“The Holy Spirit, Privatization,
and Life in the Citizen’s Bank Fast Lane”

A sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, October 17, 2004

at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

 

 

This sermon had its genesis a couple of weeks ago while I was driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Like some of you, I have on my windshield the transponder that is called Fast Lane – in other states it’s called EZ-Pass. This is the device that allows me to drive through the toll booth, not stop or wait in traffic, and the tolls are automatically billed to my credit card. The appropriate lanes are marked with big signs that say Fast Lane, except that recently they’ve been changed and now they all say Citizen’s Bank Fast Lane and, once you notice these signs, there are just a whole lot of them everywhere big, small and in-between. A case could be made on aesthetics alone, the visual clutter, that there’s a problem here.

 

It is odd enough to have the Boston Garden replaced by the Fleet Center and sports stadia across the country now named for FedEx and Coors and Toyota and Tropicana and Staples and Monster Cable Products (that’s the new San Francisco 49ers stadium); but at least those are privately-owned. There is something that especially galls me when it is made plain that our public utilities – entities that are allegedly owned by we, the people and allegedly operate for the betterment of all citizen’s in our commonweal – now promote the pecuniary business interests of the few. Where does it say that somebody can sell the naming rights to our roads? How much money was paid? (Perhaps this is but the tip of the iceberg: in yesterday’s newspaper I noticed that the City of Chicago has sold their entire tollroad, the Chicago Skyway, lock, stock and pothole – to a private company, the first such sale in the nation.)

 

Meanwhile, I’m still upset about the Fast Lane. So I got on the phone. Customer service at Fast Lane tells me “we have nothing to do with this. You should call Citizen’s Bank.” I protested, “But I want to talk to someone in our government, my government.” “Oh,” said the people at Fast Lane, “you’ll have to talk to someone else. We’re a private company. The Turnpike Authority has contracted with us to handle automated toll collection.” I see. Now I am tempted to call Matt Amorello, the Chairman of the Turnpike Authority. His name is also on signs all over the Turnpike and, if you go to their website, he’s written a lovely ode to autumn leaf-peeping on the Turnpike. But I just wasn’t confident that I could get Chairman Amorello’s attention and so, several phone calls later, I spoke with the Turnpike’s Director of Business Development, a very disarming guy named Steve Jacques. He told me that Chairman Amorello very much believes in generating non-toll revenues, that some time ago the Bank of Boston had naming rights to Fast Lane and that this time Citizen’s Bank has paid 1.3 million dollars for a four-year contract; and, he said, the Bank even provides all the signs – which may explain why they contributed a few hundred extras just for added decoration. This is all done, Steve reminded me, to lessen the pressure to increase tolls. I told him that I’d be willing to pay the extra nickel or dime to keep the Bank’s advertising off the Turnpike but, we both agreed, I am likely in the minority.

 

Steve and I had a good conversation, we’ve since exchanged emails, and I’ve told him that I’m not altogether unsympathetic to the need for unconventional fund-raising. After all, we at First Parish have cell phone antennas in our steeple and money is still tight but that rental income really does help. I understand that these days, good management in a church or a turnpike requires creativity. I assured Steve that, if the only complaint he got about the program came from the liberal minister of a small church in Bedford, well, he didn’t have much to worry about.

 

Nonetheless, I remain distressed because I observe the phenomenon of privatization more and more – and it happens at the expense of our public life and the common good and its pernicious effects may be observed in our environment where not only the land but the air, the water, and everything is for sale. The effects of privatization are evident in our public education, in health care and the virtual absence of a public health care system, in our imperial war machinery, and insidiously as well, in our family life – all of which comprise and define our spiritual life.

 

I will provide examples of all this – and I know that you can provide more – but the context I want to establish is foremost a spiritual context, for all of this is of utmost importance to our spirits and to the human spirit. Our religious tradition, especially, cares deeply about matters of the spirit and gird yourself now for a short lesson in theology (the only kind of theological lesson I know):

 

That which some people call God, or the holy or the divine or one’s ground of being or that which is of utmost importance – these things have different forms, different expressions, different manifestations. This is the brilliance of the Trinity – God (or whatever you want to call it) comes in at least three ways – Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Right? I don’t know why they stopped at three and didn’t go on to 10,000 like the Hindus but the first of three classical ways to understand this God-phenomenon is that God can be like a parent, a father or mother, a creator who has given us the greatest gift, life itself. This is a God who also instructs, protects, chastises, guides.

 

A second way of experiencing this God-notion is that God can be made incarnate, made real and earthly. You probably know that experience of being blown away by a person or a place, some one or some thing that seems utterly and completely holy – like Jesus, I suppose, or some other saint or teacher or exemplar or you or you or you for that matter, or perhaps it’s the Grand Canyon or Mt. Fuji or your own backyard. Someone, something, someplace that is the incarnation of the ultimate.

 

And, then, there’s a third classical way: God or whatever can be revealed and experienced in that which happens between and among human beings, the holy spirit. The spirit is about all that inspirits us by Eros and logos, in love and forgiveness, in justice and in community, and in all the deep things that are possible between and among human beings.

 

Different religious traditions tend to put different accent marks on these aspects of divine presence. Our liberal tradition tends to be most inspired by this third way of knowing God. Ours is a theology of spirit or to use a technical term that is both automotive and theological: this is called a pneumatic theology. Spirit is pneuma.

 

We – Unitarian Universalists and theological liberals – are the ones who most revere that which can happen between and among human beings; we are inspirited by the possibilities inherent in our reason and in our passion and in the ways we human beings can aspire to a likeness to that which we consider godly or good. Theologian James Luther Adams used to say that “for Unitarian Universalists, revelation happens in conversation” – in the words and the silences, the interstices of relationship. It is no surprise that so many of our hymns and prayers refer to the Spirit of Life, the spirit of love.

 

OK, ours is a tradition of the holy spirit. You still with me? And what do we know about the holy spirit? We know that “it bloweth where is listeth,” (that’s John 3:8) it cannot be restrained, it has no bounds, it flourishes only in freedom, it cannot be zoned or subdivided, put in a jar on the marketplace shelf, price-tagged, bar-coded, bought, sold or in any way privatized.

 

It is always tempting, however, to narrow and confine the spirit to that which is personal rather than universal, individual rather than communal, rare not common, private not public. This religious community exists, in part, to be a bridge between our private and public lives. Of course, we pay attention to the births and deaths and the anxieties, crises and neuroses of our daily living – we aspire to be present to one another in our joys, sorrows and perplexities. But our purpose in being together is not to stay here or wallow here or remain as we are; our purpose – the spirit’s purpose – is to breathe deeply and to change us, to take us places, to move us, to move us out beyond the walls of this meetinghouse and the walls of our own homes and the walls of our thick heads and constricted hearts and out into the lives and hearts and heads of our sisters and brothers, to expand and inspirit the world with more love, more hope, more forgiveness, more justice, more of all that which inspirits us.

 

The temptations of narrowness and privatization are great.

 

There is brewing, for example, a worldwide crisis over water. Water consumption is doubling every 20 years while water sources are depleted, diverted and exploited by corporate interests, industrial-agricultural manufacturing, electricity production and mining. “Water is the oil of the 21^st century,” predicts Fortune Magazine. Water supplies worldwide, including the US, are being privatized. Even when some areas of the country face water shortages, corporations from Vivendi to Nestle are poised to sell bulk water from the Great Lakes in Wisconsin and Michigan. Public water supplies – in places like Washington, D.C. and New Orleans are being sold to private interests. The bottled water business – which a previous generation might have laughed off along with pet rocks and tin cans of souvenir air from Cape Cod – is booming with companies like Coca-Cola anticipating that water sales will be more profitable than Coke. And just how – when bottled water is less regulated, less safe and tastes identical to tap water – just how did bottled water become so popular? When our natural resources – water, air, forests, drilling rights in the oceans and the arctic – are offered to the highest bidder, it is a spiritual crisis, a crisis of the human spirit.

 

Meanwhile, in Bedford, we have middle school kids going door-to-door selling magazine subscriptions and other kids selling wrapping paper and tins of peanut brittle and gee-gaws – all to support our schools, our teachers and so-called public education. In exchange, kids get prizes – like backpacks or jackets or something really popular like a limousine ride to McDonald’s. I’m told that it used to be an iron rule that elementary school children were never to be used for fund-raisers; but, apparently, that is no more. And I’ve bought my wrapping paper and my magazine subscriptions that I don’t need and my holiday peanut brittle, but why – as a community, a commonwealth, a nation – are we so reluctant to pay for that which we want and expect and need? The privatization of public education diminishes the human spirit.

 

I need not say much about health care. You may be interested to know, however, that a Jewish congregation in Sudbury is about to open a free clinic – free to the uninsured, to the elderly, to those who have a hard time making ends meet. Free screenings, free immunizations, free medications, free counsel about where to get some insurance. There’s a flyer on our bulletin board. This is in Sudbury! Is there anything we can be doing here? The privatization of public health diminishes the human spirit.

 

And then there’s the privatization of our imperial war machinery. Oh, I’ve said so much you already agree with, let’s drive up my negatives a little. I support the reinstitution of the draft. Yes, some of us protested the draft in the 60’s and we are certainly concerned for our own young women and men now, but an all-volunteer military is really a way of privatizing our armed forces. We pay courageous people to fight and die, in our name; and we put up yellow ribbons and – whatever we think of their mission – we fail not to applaud their heroism. But what would it be like if all our families were at mortal risk? As it is now, we may debate and protest and vote but our convictions and our hands are bloodless. The common good and the human spirit do not distinguish between my son and the sons and daughters who voluntarily serve. Privatization deceives and masks reality.

 

Finally, I would again speak of our families. I recently read a review of a new book titled Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America by Peter Stearns. Surveying the advice literature from Skinner to Spock to Brazelton, he notes our near-obsession with our children: “Breast or bottle? Let them cry or hold them? Should baby sleep alone or with us? How should we discipline? Are we being too harsh and damaging the child’s self-esteem or too lax and creating a self-indulgent narcissist? Are we pushing grades too much or too little? Should teachers be tougher or more encouraging? Should our kids be working around the house more? Should they have jobs? Are highly competitive sports a good or bad thing? How much should we be responsible for entertaining children and how much should they learn to entertain themselves?”

 

From these plaguing questions, Stearns observes the rise of two overriding ideas that have intensified child-rearing anxiety: the ideas of “the vulnerable child” and that of “the precious child.” Your child is in constant danger, you are told. And, as parents have fewer children and as infant mortality declines, each of our precious children receives more attention. Stearns argues that this combination of vulnerability and preciousness increases worry. And while some parents may neglect their children, his greater concern is the tendency to overinvest and overworry about one’s own children.

 

And here, again, comes privatization and Stearns says something really interesting: Fearful as we have become and devoted to our precious children as we wish to be, “parents’ anxiety about their own children might have reduced adults’ political concern for children in general.” Excess worry and devotion to that which is best for our own children tends to the neglect of what is best for all children. And once again: The human spirit is not an entitlement to some; it is available to all. Unfettered, the spirit is not vulnerable but it is powerful, the spirit is not precious nor rare but generously, abundantly and commonly our own.

 

So…the scary things about selling our hymns and prelude and prayers and bell-pings is that it was so easy. And though my motives were mostly satiric and I had no particular intention to raise money, many people were more than ready to give REAL MONEY for their privatized promotions. We could do this sort of thing once in a while and it would easily surpass what we make on a rummage sale. Sometimes we too would rather enhance our “non-pledge revenues” rather than raise our pledges. And, as said before, I am not altogether unsympathetic. Privatizing is a human instinct that responds to our fears and our genuine need for self-protection. But today the danger is great that we will sell it all off, everything, to the highest bidder or almost any bidder; we will sell our inheritance for a mess of pottage. The liberal spirit, the holy spirit, the human spirit is not for sale.

 

And as I’ve already given you an explication of the Holy Trinity, I’ll conclude with three questions, asked by the ancient sage Rabbi Hillel:

 

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am for myself alone, what am I?

And if not now, when?