Mark Johnson: Wealth and the American way

By Mark Johnson
columnist@kyforward.com

“I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go.” Maybe you’ve seen this slogan before. I first ran across it as a young adult, reading it from the back bumper of a vehicle driven by my boss. Though he owned his own small business, he was really telling the world everything he had wasn’t really completely his.

This was during the late 1980s. It introduced a time of easy credit and economic expansion. It was a promising time of exuberance and excess. Even with the looming – and proven later to be unfounded – fears of Y2K sitting on the horizon, the national mood was to “party like it’s 1999.”

Today, we are coming to grips with the delicate house of cards of our national economy, built as much by selfish greed and personal material excess as by ingenuity and the leverage of one non-material asset against another. It has been an addictively fun but very dangerous game. So much fun, the players on the field are still playing it.

With each passing day it becomes more obvious. The time on the clock has expired. We are desperate for a new game with a new set of rules. We crave leaders who can work together and who truly desire to serve the common good before it’s too late. Before out of necessity, we fear a new way will be forced upon us. The problems appear too complex and the dysfunction too uncertain to offer any hope.

At a more personal level, in the United States, there are over 600 million open credit card accounts with a total debt of $ 15,799 averaged per household. Many small businesses operate through credit. Young professionals and graduate students are shackled with student loans. Our national debt is a staggering 14.56 trillion dollars growing every second and translated into a nearly $50,000 liability per U.S. citizen.

These are stressful and worrisome times. From a spiritual perspective, there is only one way clear. It is a solution as old as the ages and taught in all major religions. It requires us, people of faith, to wrestle with our primal instinct of self-survival and broaden our concern for the other, especially the powerless, symbolized as the widow and orphan of the Hebrew tradition and of the sick, hungry and naked in the parables and ministry of Jesus.

At first it seems counter-productive. How does a crisis of personal wealth translate into concern for others? The answer comes from spiritual wisdom. When we only focus on personal needs, we die. But to live for others is life. Perhaps, in these moments God is asking us to re-examine our values and priorities?

Put another way, if the comforts and successes we have gained were the result of what has been given to us by way of birth or of privilege, then by what right do we deny others equal access to their own desire of comfort and success?

The economy of compassion is the economy of security for our neighbor and paradoxically, also for ourselves. The more we seek personal gain, especially at the expense and neglect of the most vulnerable, the greater the chance we will live in a world none of us can inhabit. Our lack of concern for the aged, the mentally ill, the starving, homeless child and the truly poor is an indication not of wealth, but of the spiritual poverty and malaise of these days.

We can live in fear and selfishness and watch our anxiety go through the roof. Or we can look around our homes already filled with more than we need and with grateful hearts: tighten our belts, seek freedom from our addictions and seek to live – not only within our means – but within a deeper desire for peace, fairness and kindness to one another.

This direction calls forth a faith in the things we cannot easily see or touch. It requires an advocacy and a concern for the person who has no voice and no power. It restructures how we pray, serve and grow in our faith communities. It redefines our understanding of wealth. And it is the only real hope for our economy and our future.

Mark Johnson is the senior minister of Central Baptist Church in Lexington. He is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and earned his doctorate in ministry at the Lexington Theological Seminary. Mark has served as president of the Interfaith Alliance of the Bluegrass and is on the executive council of the Kentucky Council of Churches.