Concerning Ownership         [“Faith at Work,” sermon #VIII]

 

                                                                                                            2/29/48

 

Scripture:  Deuteronomy 4: 1-10

 

Text:  Exodus 20: 15;  “Thou shalt not steal.”

 

Now and then a voice is raised to say that money is “unimportant;” that the major thing is the life of the spirit or the life of the mind.  Or we hear an excited voice declaiming that the profit motive must be displaced by the motive of “service.”

 

Actually a lot of that kind of talk is nonsense.  Money is vastly important, especially when one has none.  Profits are entirely necessary -- most evidently and painfully necessary when none have been made!  Human activity in the economic area has to be a blend of profits and service, of money and general human welfare.

 

Any “superiority” to the temptations connected with property is chiefly possible only to those who are well endowed by inheritance and are hence able to do much as they please.  And a haughty contempt for “things” is not at all impressive when it is connected with a secure income derived from tax-exempt securities and administered by a trust company!

 

There is a sense in which men and women must live above material considerations as Saint Francis did partly in the 13th century, and Gandhi did partly in our own century - even as our Lord did in deed and example during his mortal life of 1900 centuries ago.

 

But the proposition that the higher life is quite independent of possessions is simply not true.  Sometimes the ownership of great possessions is a real barrier to the promotion of good spiritual living.  Jesus pointed this out sharply in his talk with a certain rich young ruler.  But more often in human experience, it is a lack of possessions that is the greater barrier.

 

A chief reason why money is so important is that the lack of it leads not only to personal hardship, but to terrible rivalry and lasting bitterness.  It may seem logically possible to some lofty- minded person that one should be able to live above his environment in the crowded Black ghetto of one of our larger cities.  But it is a terrifically hard thing to do!

 

G. A. Studdert-Kennedy said that the real meaning of money was borne in on him when he saw a girl dying of tuberculosis while she lived, as he observed, “in one of those abominable pigsties which do for houses for a considerable portion of our population.”  The girl could get well -- but not there.  The only condition of her survival was enough money to get her out of there to a decent place where she could have fresh air, good food, comfortable care.  Studdert-Kennedy went out and got the money.  He says he then knew what money is.  “It is the power to demand a human service and be sure you will get it.”

 

It is because money and property can mean so much in human welfare, in the means of knowledge and in opportunity to appreciate beauty, that we ought to value it very highly.  We ought to value it not as well engraved bank notes; hoarded gold or silver; but as evidence of service performed, of good life accumulated for furthering of more good life - for what it will do in our lives and in the lives of others for whom we care.

 

Studdert-Kennedy says:  “If any man says to me he does not love money, I immediately begin to wonder whether he is a madman, a millionaire, or a tramp, those being the only types of people I can imagine saying it with anything like sincerity.”  (I should suppose he might have narrowed down the field somewhat more than that!)

 

It is only when we have considered and understood the human significance of money that we see why stealing is wrong and why a decent society is possible only when its “wrongness” is recognized.  It is wrong to steal a person’s property, or to withhold from him that which he has earned, because in so doing the thief may be depriving that person of his opportunity to provide food, education, privacy, clothing, etc.; --the means of good health for his family.  A society in which a man might labor for the sake of his loved ones and then have his competence taken from him by those strong enough or clever enough to get it, is a wretched society.

 

Man is not pure spirit.  He is tied up, during mortal existence, with the realm of things.  He is dependent on the cultivation of soil and the use of earth’s resources not only for physical existence but for the cultivation of his mind.  The symphony is not possible apart from the crass reality of horses’ tails and wood.  There is no violinist without bow and violin!  True religion is concerned with property, if we realize that the average man’s spiritual life is so largely dependent on possessions of some kind.

 

The classic injunction against stealing is not to protect the rich landlord from the depredation of his hungry and crowded tenants.  The purpose of that commandment is to protect the weak, or the guileless and unsuspecting, against the strong and unscrupulous; and thus to provide a solid basis for community!

 

To steal is to deprive another of the fruits of his labor, and there are many ways of stealing -- some of them temporarily lawful.

 

The agricultural landlord who gouges from his farm tenant a large annual cash rent, whether a crop is raised or not, is not taking his fair share of the risk of weather.  The tenant who does not return the agreed portion of a good crop to the landlord is not fair to the one whose property he uses.

 

There are some folk, especially convinced Marxists, who speak and write as though all religion, including the Christian religion, were a reactionary force helping to keep the rich people rich and the poor people poor.  Here they seem to follow the lead of Lenin.  To hold to this judgment, they must close their eyes, as I believe they do, to a large part of the evidence.

 

Mohammed was not bolstering up the type of Arabian society in which he was born.  Judaism was a revolutionary religion in the messages of its prophets.  In fact some of the real inspiration of the Marxists must have sprung from the Hebrew prophets.

 

Those who maintain that religion is a means of shielding the rich and quieting the poor are forced to close their eyes to John Workman’s “Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich,” printed in 1793.  They dare not even read all of the Bible, (especially the gospel of Luke.)  It simply is not true to say that religion has always been a slow, conservative force, defending the status quo and keeping the poor quiet.

 

The more we look into the matter, the more we perceive the true radicalism of the Bible.  The developing moral code of the Bible was greatly concerned with the protection of the common man, the man with a small holding which he may have inherited.  Isaiah attacks the evils which develop in absentee landlordism, and emphasizes the necessity of protecting the widows, orphans and other helpless persons.  The book of Deuteronomy emphasizes the commandment: “Thou shalt not move thy neighbor’s landmark;” and preserves this more enlightened observation: “Cursed be he that perverteth the judgment of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow.”

 

While a minor Syrian prince could grovel at the feet of his political superior -- both physically and verbally -- it was possible for a common man to stand up to a Hebrew king and denounce his mistakes.  For among the Hebrews, both common folk and kings were people!  Moses began the tradition by taking the side of the oppressed in Egypt, maintaining that God, too, was on that side!

 

See Elijah standing before a king to confront him with his wrong.  Elijah is not a priest.  He has no official standing of any sort.  The terrible judgment he renders the king is legally lese-majesty and sedition.  In any other Oriental court, the king’s guards would have struck him down instantly.  If allowed to live until dragged from the room, it would have been only to prolong his life a little with torture.  But here in Israel the king of all Israel accepts the divine verdict of a public conscience.

 

The same thing occurs when the prophet Nathan stands before King David to confront him with his sin in taking Bathsheba for his wife after having seen to it that her husband would be killed in battle.  And the king accepted the rebuke!

 

Such stories might be interpreted -- and sometimes have been - to mean that the true prophet always uphoolds the poor against the rich.  Wrong again!  Such an interpretation is profoundly erroneous.  Nathan and Elijah were not taking part in a class struggle, but were concerned with justice!  And justice -- both the receiving and the dispensing of it -- is a proper concern for all people.  Neither king nor servant, landlord or peasant, professor nor student, father nor son, rich nor poor, is exempt from its privileges or duties.

 

It is instructive to observe that, in the New Testament, Christ judges men by their fairness and their productivity.  The same Jesus who advised one rich man to sell his belongings, give to the poor, and follow Him, also had some heavy things to say, in the parable of the talents, about the man who had only one talent and used it poorly.  The fellow was not exonerated because he was poor.

 

Rich men can be predatory.  Some are.  But getting rid of rich people does not solve the human problem.  Confiscated wealth is merely transferred to other human beings who may -- and often do -- have no more sense of juustice and communal welfare than the man of the first instance.

 

Even the elimination of personal wealth in a theoretical communal society does not solve the human problem.  Poor men can be as cruel, ruthless and violent as anybody else, as any violent revolution demonstrates.  And when there is little or no private property to be held or distributed, the same old human motives set men to struggling with one another for personal status, or for the political favor that exercises power over the public property.  Indeed as Schweitzer has remarked, “Those who have very little that they can call their own are in most danger of becoming purely egoistic.”

 

Capitalism has its inherent dangers with which a capitalistic society must continually and effectively deal.  Socialism has its inherent dangers -- even greater, it seems to me.

 

The right ordering of property lies not in the elimination of private property, or its forcible transfer from one to another, but in its distribution.  The chief reason why tremendous accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few citizens is wrong is not that property is evil, but that it is so good that more people ought to have some of it!

 

Stealing is evil, because ownership is good!  An important part of the moral task is to encourage ownership and to protect it against all kinds of stealing -- direct and indirect -- which tends to break down the dignity of common living.  It is right that honest men should own houses and autos and that they should be protected in ownership so long as their ownership does no harm to others.

 

Somewhere between celibacy and the harem lies the best ground for the greatest number of people in the home of one husband with one wife.

 

Somewhere between the kind of capitalism which concentrates property in the hands of a few while all others live as serfs, peasants, tenants, small commodity laborers -- a condition which plays into the hands of revolution -- somewhere between that and economic socialism which especially plays into the hands of those who would get their hands on ruthless power -- somewhere between these extremes lies a middle course which is the right course.  Therein the widest number of people possible own their own homes, the land they till, the tools of their craft.  Therein is one of the best safeguards America has against the terrible totalitarian threat of our time.

 

Even that is not enough.

 

The only way in which our free society can be held together is by the conviction of people of good character!  Even the law will not suffice.  Our best protection is still character.  The moral judgments of our neighbors save us a thousand times while the police save us once.  Far, far better than the lock and key, necessary as they are, is the character of a people who know and believe the moral commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.”

 

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Dates and places delivered:

 

            Wisconsin Rapids, February 29, 1948

            Waioli Church, March 2, 1975