August 23, 2009
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
2 Timothy 1:3-7
I am grateful to God—whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did—when I remember you constantly in my
prayers night and day. Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere
faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. For this
reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us
a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.
INTRO
Thank you for the invitation to worship with you today. I bring greetings from the national setting of the
UCC: from our General Minister and President Rev. John Thomas and from my boss, the Executive
Minister of Justice and Witness Ministries, Rev. Linda Jaramillo.
For all of us in the national setting, I thank you for your gifts to Our Church’s Wider Mission and the
other special offerings during the year. This money pays for everything from the development of Sunday
school curriculum and work with overseas partners, to our efforts for justice in the US and around the
world. Your staff in Justice and Witness Ministries work on a variety of issues -- from economic justice
to immigration, health care and the environment. We post lots of interesting materials on the web
(www.ucc.org/justice), are available for preaching, and other presentations and workshops; we provide
ways for you to lobby your elected representatives though email alerts about important upcoming votes
(sign up at the Take Action link on the web page), and we are engaged in many other things that would
be of interest to you. Check out the web site (www.ucc.org/justice) or let me know how we can be of
assistance to you.
It is a joy to be here among you. Of course, it helps that we are in one of the most beautiful states in the
nation at a particularly lovely time of year. As Nancy and Jim mentioned, a group of women friends
spend a few days each summer with them. Being together in this lovely place with a group of special
friends is always a high point of the year. And as I thought about what to say this morning, I decided to
honor all the strong women in my life and in our lives by telling the stories of some strong women. But
before you men decide to spend even more time than usual looking out the windows at the beauty
outside, I want to assure you that although I will focus to some degree on women, and the heroes of my
stories will be heroines, everything I say, of course, applies equally to men. And I am sure that all the
strong women here are grateful for the strong men in their lives. So men: stay tuned.
TIMOTHY
The scripture today is from Second Timothy, a book that claims to be written by Paul. Today, however,
scholars believe the author was not Paul but someone writing 50 or 60 years after his death. We know
that in those days it was very common for writers who were seeking to enhance the authority of their
views and writings to claim authorship by some highly regarded person and not put their own name on
the work. That is probably true for second Timothy. But in any case, whether written by Paul or
somewhat later high church official, the letter seeks to encourage and strengthen the ministry of a
younger colleague named Timothy.
The letter was written during a difficult time in the life of the church, and during a difficult time in the
lives of these two men. Elsewhere in the letter, the author makes reference to being in prison. The church
is beset with conflict and struggling to thrive or even exist. Timothy is out traveling and working in a
society that held values that are very different his and from from those of Jesus, and in a society that is
sometimes outright hostile to the Christian message.
I am going to repeat that. The church is beset with conflict and struggling to thrive or even exist.
Timothy is out working in a society that held values that are very different from his and from those of
Jesus, and in a society that is sometimes outright hostile to the Christian message.
This was true when this letter was written. I suggest it is also true today. As Christians, as people of the
Way, we live in a society where the dominant values are very different from those we hold.
“People of the Way” is how the writer of Acts describes the early Christians. I like this phrase. These
days, the word Christian means very different things to different people and in some contexts,
personally, I would run from that description. But People of the Way hold the values that Jesus held,
they are on a journey to greater faithfulness, they are about doing and acting in the world. As we heard
this morning, thanks to , People of the Way are described by the author of second Timothy as people
with courage, not timidity, and filled with power, love, and self control.
TIFFANY CLAY
Earlier this year there was a story in the New York Times about a nation-wide high school orchestra
competition. It is called the National Orchestra Cup and it is held at Lincoln Center in New York City.
One of the orchestras chosen to compete this spring was from Newark, Ohio, the state where I live.
Newark is a small town in central Ohio that has been severely battered by the 30-year decline in
manufacturing jobs as well as by the current recession. The Newark High School orchestra worked to
pull together the money needed to participate in the competition where they performed beautifully and
tied for first runner up. The wining orchestra came from a community where the median income is three
times higher than in Newark.
Reading between the lines, it was clear that the reporter who wrote the article in the New York Times
started out to focus on the National Orchestra Cup. But along the way the focus shifted when the
reporter discovered a more compelling subject: an 18-year-old high school senior named Tiffany Clay
who was the first violinist in the Newark High School orchestra. She was also an excellent student,
excelled in Advanced Placement classes, and graduated second in her class.
But Tiffany is not a typical high school student. Her parents separated when she was young, her mother
moved to another city, and Tiffany was left to live with her father, an electrician, who was frequently
unemployed. They often were in conflict and at age 16 Tiffany moved into her own apartment and
began living on her own. So in addition to playing in the orchestra and maintaining her high grades,
Tiffany worked 35 hours a week at a local drive-in called the Sonic. This is where she earns money for
food and the rent on her $345 a month apartment. Her violin is borrowed from her music teacher who
bought it for $175 on eBay.
Tiffany had considered going to college to be a music teacher but decided to continue working at the
Sonic drive-in while attending a local two-year community college to become a licensed practical nurse.
She chose nursing because, as she says, “Everybody gets sick.” Her main interest is future job security.
This remarkable, strong, clear-sighted young woman can’t afford dreams.
Newark, Ohio, is a place where, over the past 30 years, factories have moved out, leaving behind
unemployed workers, low-wage jobs, poverty, and depressed communities and people. Half the students
in Newark are eligible for free or reduced price school lunches because they live in poor families. A third
of students drop out before graduating from high school. When the reporter asked the school
superintendent about the high drop out rate, he said it was because the students’ mindset was still back
in the days when you could be a high school dropout and get a good paying job in a factory. He noted
that “Those jobs have gone away but the mindset has not.”
Maybe kids in Newark think they can drop out of school and get good paying jobs. But I think most
students today are not so uninformed. I suspect they know most of the good paying factory jobs are
gone. They have seen that reality play out in the lives of their parents and grandparents. I suspect they
drop out because they feel they can’t get a good paying job even with a high school diploma.
And they are largely correct. Among children of low-income parents, nearly half will be low-income
adults. One-quarter will rise above their parents’ income level, but not by much. They will still be below
the middle. Just 17% (fewer than one out of five) will rise above the middle of the income spectrum.
The ability for children to end up in a better financial position than their parents is called income
mobility. In the United States, the fabled land of opportunity, income mobility is worse than in Canada
and all the major European nations except for, in some studies, the United Kingdom. One reason that
children in low-income families in the US do not do very well economically is because they can’t find
good jobs, even with a high school diploma. And for too many of them, their opportunities are
constrained, starting at a very young age.
Our question is: As People of the Way, as people, like Timothy, of courage, power, love, and self
control – is this the society we want to live in?
In the United States, one-quarter of all jobs pay poverty-level wages. We have always had low-paying
jobs. But things are getting worse. Over roughly the last 30 years, there has been a degrading of many
jobs and, consequently, an erosion of the middle class. Jobs that used to maintain a worker and his or her
family in a middle-class lifestyle have been degraded and no longer do so. Consider two examples.
MEAT PACKING
First: meatpacking – Working in a slaughterhouse is not a pleasant occupation. The work is hard, dirty,
and unpleasant. But it also used to be a good job in many ways. As recently at the early 1980s,
meatpacking was on par with working in the auto or steel industries in terms of pay and benefits. But
starting in the early 1980s, a series of changes occurred in the industry. The union was broken and the
slaughterhouses became nonunion. Smaller firms were bought out by larger ones. Corporate power
increased as a few huge multinationals came to control a large segment of the meatpacking industry.
These corporations squeezed workers as well as ranchers. The final result is that jobs that had enabled
workers to have a middle-class standard of living and gave them respect and dignity, were turned into
low-wage, dangerous jobs that demean workers. Now, the meatpacking industry employs many
immigrants.
Because we are in the midst of a national debate about immigration, I want to say a few words about
immigrants and jobs. We often hear than immigrants take jobs that native-born workers won’t. But to
say that native-born workers don’t want jobs like those in the meatpacking industry does not really get at
the heart of the matter. We need to ask: why are these jobs so horrible that the only workers who will
take them are people driven by the knowledge that their children in Mexico or elsewhere will not eat
unless they take and keep that horrible job. The wages are low and the working conditions are dangerous
not because they need to be. But so that IBP or Cargill or Smithfield can boost their profits and so we
can eat too much under-priced meat. These workers’ low wages are subsidizing our life style. No one --
neither native-born workers nor immigrants -- should have to work under these conditions.
As People of the Way, as people of courage, power, love, and self control – is this the society we
want to live in?
Consider one other example of the degradation of jobs and people.
Los Angeles and Long Beach are two of the largest ports in the US and together they receive nearly half
of all seaborne imports that enter the US. Some 70 miles east of LA is the city of Fontana, a place of
warehouses that employ some 100,000 people. Forty years ago the main employer was a large Kaiser
Steel plant. It closed in 1983, just a few years before the warehouses started springing up in the late
1980s. The warehouse jobs weren’t quite as good as those in the mill but, initially, they weren’t bad. The
really bad jobs are a more recent development.
About eight to ten years ago, the warehouse industry restructured itself. Before then, retailers including
corporations like Wal-Mart or Home Depot owned their own warehouses and warehouse workers were
employed directly by the retailer. You could look at a warehouse and see “Sears” or “Target” or
“Lowes” written on it and know who owned it and who employed the people who worked there.
Today, the warehouses in Fontana still handle goods destined for these retailers. But you don’t see any
names on the building. Now the warehouses are owned by commercial real estate companies. Each
building is leased by the commercial real estate company to a warehouse management firm that oversees
the warehouse operation. About half the warehouse management firms hire employees to work directly
for the warehouse management firm. But about half of these warehouse management firms contract with
a temp agency for workers. These “permatemps” will work in the same place, doing the same job for
years but without the legal protections and financial advantages of being an employee. They are paid
significantly less per hour and have fewer benefits than regular warehouse workers. And there is no
promise of full-time work. They must phone in every day to see if they need to come to work. The
permatemps’ starting pay is slightly above $7 an hour and can eventually they may make up to $12 an
hour with few benefits. At the top wage, if they work full time, they would get about $25,000 a year.
These workers are subsidizing the prices we pay in big-box stores.
In addition to receiving lower wages and fewer benefits, permatemps are also in somewhat of a legal
limbo. If an unsafe condition on the job site results in an injury to a permatemp, who is responsible: the
temp agency that employs the worker but has no presence on the job site? Or the warehouse management
firm that does oversee the worksite but does not employ the worker? It is a situation easily exploited to
the workers’ disadvantage.
The big box stores that sit at the top of this chain drive the whole process and have the power to change
it. They are very involved in specifying how the warehouses are to be run to ensure the goods and
products are handled with speed and efficiency. However, they choose not to get involved in issues
having to do with the treatment of warehouse workers.
So over a roughly 25 to 30-year period, the good steel mill jobs became not quite so good but fairly
decent warehouse jobs. But now many of these jobs have deteriorated further to become permatemp jobs
with low pay and few benefits where you aren’t even sure whether you’re working until you call in.
As People of the Way, as people of courage, power, love, and self control – is this the society we
want to live in?
INEQUALITY
The overall impact of this trend of turning jobs with good wages and benefits into jobs with low wages,
few benefits, and questionable working conditions has been the growth in inequality: the rich got richer
and everyone else got what was left over.
Over the past 30 years among the bottom 90% of households, some had rising incomes and some had
falling incomes. All together, adjusted for inflation, among the bottom 90%, average income rose just
2% over the 30-years. For example, if a household started at $30,000 a year (measured in today’s
dollars) then today, 30 years later, they would have an additional $600 a year, on average. At the same
time, consider what happened among the top 1% of households. For those folks, instead of a 2%
increase, average income rose 238%. So a household that had income of $150,000 a year 30 years ago,
would today have an income of over half a million dollars, an increase of over $350 thousand. There is
something deeply wrong with this situation.
We live in an extremely rich society but one that is also appears to be mean, stingy, apparently uncaring.
One in six people have no health insurance. As already mentioned, one in four jobs pay poverty level
wages. One in eight people live in poverty even judged by our extremely low federal standard. By other
measures that look at what people actually need to thrive in a modest way, fully 30% of families have
inadequate income.
As People of the Way, as people of courage, power, love, and self control – is this the society we
want to live in?
Consider one other small but telling example – our height. People in the United States have always been
much taller -- they have been giants -- compared to people in all other countries including Europe. But
now, while American men and women have not shrunk, we are shorter, on average, than people in every
single country in western and northern Europe. And the change is not due to the presence of shorter
immigrants.
Why is this? Height among individuals is predominantly determined by genetics. But the average height
of a population is mostly determined by their nutrition and overall health, especially of children starting
with prenatal care through adolescence. Our high level of poverty (especially among children), the
prevalence of hunger, the deeply flawed health care system, our weak social safety net, and lack of
social supports for mothers all contribute to our relatively shorter stature.
If we are falling behind other nations in something so basic and fundamental as height, it is frightening
and deeply disturbing to think about the other ways we must also be falling behind. If children are not
able to do something so basic as reaching their full height, how can they be fully developing their
intellectual gifts or their artistic gifts? How can we do this to our children?
As People of the Way, as people of courage, power, love, and self control – is this the society we
want to live in?
IT WASN’T ALWAYS THIS WAY
I have been describing the last 30 years, approximately 1980 through today. But there was a time in the
United States when things were not this way, a time when economic differences between the less well
off and the wealthy were shrinking, not growing.
In the first 30 years after WWII, until roughly 1980, economic differences were becoming smaller.
Incomes for people on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder were rising faster than those in the
middle, and incomes for people in the middle were rising faster than those at the top. The poverty rate
during those years fell by over half to a low of 8.8% in 1974. Since then, in only one year, 2000, did the
poverty rate get any lower and then it was only very slightly better (at 8.7%). In that early period, 1950-
1980, there were more good jobs. There was more opportunity. There were plenty of problems in those
days. Racial discrimination was a huge problem, as it is today. But the sharing of our national wealth
was much better then than today.
HILDA SOLIS
Let’s consider the story of another woman. She was born in 1957, the daughter of poor immigrants, the
third of seven children. Her family lived in California, next to a land fill – otherwise known as a garbage
dump. Her father worked in a battery recycling plant. Her mother worked in a toy factory. But it was a
time when economic differences were becoming more narrow, not wider. Opportunities were greater
than today for those in the lower and middle rungs of the economic ladder.
Of course, everything wasn’t great. The high school guidance counselor of this poor Hispanic girl
advised her mother that she was not college material and should follow the path of her older sister and
become a secretary. But this young girl did go to college. At that time, college tuition in the California
state schools was close in zero. She did eventually become a secretary: the United States’ Secretary of
Labor Hilda Solis, a member of President Obama’s cabinet. For a poor girl growing up in those times, a
brighter future was possible. In my experience, it is not uncommon to meet professional people, and after
you get to know them, learn they grew up in the projects of New York City (where the City College of
New York charged no tuition) or LA, or other places. Will today’s kids growing up in public housing or
homeless shelters be tomorrow’s professionals?
What about Tiffany Clay, the musician from Newark, Ohio? Tiffany will also be going to college this
fall. This is due to the generosity of strangers. After her story appeared in the New York Times, she
received many offers of financial assistance and violins. The Sonic Corporation (the corporate owner of
the drive-in where Tiffany worked) in conjunction with Oklahoma City University (the Sonic
Corporation is located in Oklahoma City) are providing free tuition and board and room for four years.
Sonic Corp has about 3,500 drive-ins around the country and annual revenue of $780 million. Americans
can be generous. But how many Tiffanys are out there whose story will not appear on the front page of
the New York Times ? How many Tiffany will lose hope and drop out before they graduate from high
school? Personal generosity is great. But what we really need is a society that provides opportunities to
all children, teens, and adults so they reach their potential.
What happened around 1980 to bring about the changes we have been discussing? the change from a
society where everyone across the economic spectrum and especially those at the bottom were all doing
better…. to where we are now: with many doing worse, particularly those on the bottom rungs of the
ladder, while those at the top take most of the gains?
There is a very detailed answer to this question that we could discuss at another time in a workshop or
multiple workshops. But the short answer is this: we began to change our economic policies. We were no
longer putting in place, or keeping in place, the economic structures and programs that would provide
opportunity and a decent life for all. Instead we began to fall prey to language about the “free market.”
Let the market decide.
Well, in a “free market” where corporations are more powerful than any worker, workers will lose out. In
a world where corporations are more powerful than the environmental movement, then the environment
will suffer. In a world where money talks very loudly in Washington DC and in state capitals and where
corporations and the wealthy have most of the money, then ordinary people will lose out. And an
unregulated “free market” can be very risky and unstable as the recent crashes in real estate and the stock
market have shown.
But we are people of courage, power, love, and self control. We need to bring these gifts to the national
debate about economic policy, and to other policy debates: about health care, immigration, the
environment, and many others.
Martin Luther King said, the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice. And we say in the
UCC, God is still speaking … and acting, and calling us to be People of the Way. Like Timothy, let us
rekindle the gift of God that is within us – the gifts of courage, power, love, and self-control. Let us be
about the business of working with God to build a society that values and honors all people. Amen.
Barry, Dan. “At an Age for Music and Imagination, Real Life is Winning,” New York Times April 15, 2009.
Bottom 1/5th nearly half (42%)
Rivera, Amaad, Jeannette Huezo, Christina Kasica, and Dedrick Muhammad. State of the Dream 2009: The Silent
Depression, United for a Fair Economy, 2009. http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/state_of_the_dream_2009 Compare income
about 30 years later – were age 0-18 initially.
Meyerson, Harold, “The Shipping Point” American Prospect July/Aug 2009, p 19
Mishel, Lawrence. “Waging Inequality” July 2009 This includes capital gains.
http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/jobs_with_good_benefits_increasingly_scarce/. Est of HH income in 1979
from Table A-1 “Income, Poverrty, and HI Coverage in the US 2007.” Census P-60
http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p60-235.pdf
Lin, James and Jared Bernstein. What we need to get by: A basic standard of living costs $48,778, and nearly a third of
families fall short. Economic Policy Institute 2008 http://epi.3cdn.net/0136f3b9a1aa8e2a34_f0m6bnry2.pdf
Holland, Joshua. “America’s Declining Stature: How Did We Become Shorter Than Europe?” July 9, 2007.
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/56303
Greenhouse, Steven. “As Labor Secretary, Finding Influence in her Past.” New York Times July 6, 2009.
Sermon 08/23/2009