Lent 3

Third Sunday of Lent Exodus 20.1-17 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. 1 Corinthians 1.18-25 The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. John 2.13-22 Zeal for your house will consume me. Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up

1. Ten freedoms 2. The temple 3. Britain as temple 4. Confident nation 5. Saving and the future 6. Disappearing nation 7. Restoring the temple We are on our way to Easter. We are following the readings for the five Sundays of Lent that take us to Palm Sunday. We have heard that God has brought man into covenant with himself, that God regards man and creation as good, and that his covenant with them will not come to an end. Last week we heard that the promise of God has brought a new society into being, and will sustain the society that lives from this promise. The covenant given to Abraham sustains his people to this day. In Christ all other societies have received this same promise that God will sustain us, and within this covenant we will be able to receive all men as good company, and to give ourselves to others and so create new covenants with them. 1. The commandment of God This week we hear the words spoken to the people of Israel at Sinai, recorded in the Book of Exodus, ‘I am the Lord your God’. For the third week running we are confronted with this absolute assurance that God has given himself to man, that God loves and esteems man and knows him and sustains this relationship with him in which man may if he desires, freely acknowledge God. The ten commandments constitute a single statement – I am your God. We hear it also as an invitation and question – Shall I be your God? We can put it the other way around – Do not have any other gods. Why give yourself away to any other ‘gods’? Altogether these commandments tell us not to idolatrise, not to accept any substitutes. You will find these commandments written above the altar of almost every church in the City of London, because the builders of these churches recognises that this covenant and commandment is the basis of all society and human transacting.

Man is the image of God, literally the eidolon of God. Every human being is, and all humans together are, the image of himself that God has chosen. Let us accept no substitutes for him. We can spend our lives attempting to give this image away, and substituting other images for it, but we cannot finally succeed in doing so. We can mar this image, let it become distorted by rage and unrecognisable, but we cannot shake it off. We cannot so abuse our bodies and destroy our souls that God no longer recognises us as his own. Nothing substitutes for God, and nothing substitutes for man who is the image of God. We may attempt to substitute for man in many ways, but all are destructive, none are sustainable. By indicating what it excludes, these commandments set out the freedom that belongs to God and man his creature. The sabbath indicates the limits God sets on our power to compel other people to our purposes. We fail to know the limits of freedom if we misuse the name of the Lord, if we despise our parents or forebears, if we kill, commit adultery, steal, are untruthful or avaricious. In this covenant with God we may discover freedom from the compulsion to substitute means for ends, by subordinating people, who bear the image of God, to any other ‘economic’ logic. 2. The temple of God for man Our gospel reading from the Gospel of John tells us that Jesus entered the temple. The temple is the place in which man may go to pray and speak with his Lord there. The temple is the house of prayer for all nations: anyone may come to it, receive a hearing from the God of gods, and receive the justice that he has not received anywhere else. The temple is the house in which God make himself present to man. It re-distributes from the poorer to the richer, releases the poor from their debts when they ask for forgiveness, demonstrates to the rich how to exercise generosity, and so maintains the unity and functioning of that society. Was the temple cleaning and empowering the people of Israel in their relationship with God? Did this House of God enable and support a confident population? This is the question that Jesus puts to the priesthood and the temple regime. The answer is given when Jesus enters the temple and drives out those he finds selling animals and changing money there. The people of Israel were being exhausted by the financial burden of the sacrifices that constituted access to the temple. The way to the mercy and justice of God was blocked by a caste of intermediaries that were milking those who came to them, de-motivating and separating them from God. The temple mechanism had gone into reverse, so that it is now distributing in the wrong direction, not trickling-down but siphoning up from poorer to richer. Jesus sees that the people of Israel, to whom the covenant has been given, are being excluded from access to the promises of God by a cabal. Zeal for his Father’s house consumes him: love for God’s chosen people, the people of God’s household, drives him. Jesus enters the temple to cleanse and restore it as the place in which Israel may pray and worship God, and this is what this is what his passion, cross and resurrection effect. Christ tears down a faulty dispensation that separated man from God and from his fellow man, and in its place rebuilds the relationship of man with God

so that man can truly live with God in permanence. Christ is our access to God and so our temple. All other temples function only as they point to Christ. Last week we saw that houses are only worth anything if they serve to produce children and so reproduce society. Let us first consider British society as though it were single temple and household, that serves to keep all the relationships of which the nation is made up in good health. 3. Britain as temple of God The British economy is a reflection of British society. We could even say that the economy is what our society is, and it is an expression of what other countries and other economies believe our society is. We could claim to have invented Capitalism in the City of London. The practices of trade and commerce, and the free flow of information and goods and services came into existence here. Foreigners brought their savings here not only because they were confident that it would grow, but that they would be able to get those savings out again. They believe that there is such a solid tradition of legal transparency and public accountability here that their money could never simply disappear. They believe that our society has been so formed by the virtues of honesty and self-control, that they are confident of our public ability to hold one another to account. We have the law and legal system that produces good and impartial unbiased decisions, so there are not different prices for different people. What has created this belief about the City of London? It is our slow formation that has resulted from our long exposure to the Christian tradition that has made us honesty, even when it is not to our short-term advantage, and honesty is what market transparency and market efficiency are. Without this tradition of virtues that built a trusted market here, London would still be just a village on a muddy river. Recent decades have seen massive economic growth around the world, a growth that since the mid-nineties seemed to have buoyed up the whole United Kingdom. But the economic crisis that we are now experiencing is serious enough to make us ask how much of this has been true growth? Has this increase in prosperity been the result of any growth in our industriousness or productivity? Along with this ostensible increase in prosperity we have also suffered a massive loss in the first and fundamental economy of the family, the economy that reproduces persons. This primary economy is secured by marriage, the institution that gives us the confidence to reproduce children and to support them through the long years in which they become public members of society and confident economic agents. Could it be that in the last fifty years we have experienced a significant loss of social capital because we have frittered away the institution that generates it? In order to make sense of our economic situation we have to examine the confidence and social capital of our nation as though they were economic assets. Old people lend to young people. We have lots of old people who want to lend to young people, but we do not have lots of young people. We have a growing shortfall of young people, and this is the reason why we are experiencing a banking crisis and why, if the crisis goes away this time, it will assuredly come back again. Now since this conclusion may seem completely implausible at first hearing, I will take a little time to set it out.

Let us start by looking at the housing market. As house prices relentlessly surged up we felt prosperous and confident to borrow, so we have been on a long shopping binge, that has seemed to grow not only our economy, but the global economy. We did not ask whether house prices could continue to rise. They could not do so, for there are more people in their seventies trying to sell houses than there are people in their thirties trying to buy them. The result is that the price of houses will fall, the security against which we have all felt confident to borrow is gone and our shopping spree is over. House prices have been fuelling the whole economy, but houses are only worth anything as long as there are young people to buy them. When today’s thirty year olds are seventy, there will be still fewer people to sell those houses to, for today’s thirty-year olds are not having enough children to replace today’s seventy year olds. Our economic crisis is an expression of a much more long-term crisis of demography. No other issue can be seen for what it is until we have grasped this one. In the UK we talk about demography only in terms of a coming pensions crisis, but almost no one seems to realise that the imbalance between old and young people will effect the economy as a whole. Are we are in denial about this demographic issue because it has been drummed into us that there are too many people, by those who are not convinced that man is an unreservedly good thing, or are we in denial about it because the problem is so huge that we fear that there is no solution? 4. Confidence and the nation I have a question for you. Do you want to be part of a young and vigorous society, or an old and exhausted one? Do you want to be part of a you and vigorous economy, or an old and exhausted one? Our population is not growing. The population of old people is growing, but seen over the long term our population is shrinking. An ageing population is experiencing a temporary population rise, and masking a dramatic future reduction. If on average women have two children, they replace themselves and their children’s father and the population stays the same. But in Britain, far from producing 2.4 children, we are producing less than two. Since the 1960’s the population of Britain has applied the emergency brake, so we are facing a 4-2-1 problem: one child will have to support two parents and four grandparents. This is issue is less obvious in London than it is in any other part of the country. We have to thank God for all our African and Asian women who are glad to have children, for without our new arrivals and their families, things would be grimmer. We must even be glad for those benefits-supported women who have children, since welfare seems to give them more confidence than those with incomes. But the nation has become dependent on people coming in to stave off the consequences of its own growing childlessness. Last week I suggested that loss of the morale that empowers to give ourselves to one another, and to work and serve one another in covenants, might have something to do with this. We used to understand marriage as a public affair. In getting married we did something that society regarded as unequivocally good, and in going to work to support our families we were giving our lives to something unique and worthwhile, which all society could recognise and appreciate.

But successive Acts of Parliament and a generation of so-called ‘family law’ have changed our understanding of marriage from a public to a private affair, and taken away our confidence in marriage with the result that the social capital that marriage produces has been leaching away. A new legal regime allows spouses to dismiss one another from their responsibilities. When a marriage breaks up the personal is replaced by the impersonal and institutional, for another partner steps in to provide the missing long-term relationship. When marriage is not regarded as permanent and indissoluble, the state provide the long-term partnership. No single parent is really alone for they are married to the state, which has become the universal husband and dad. Now that law and public policy has made it easy, finances dissolve the familial and social bonds of which civil society is made. We have by default created a generation of parents who have been outbid and made redundant, so that their love, presence and hands-on contribution is not required. Married couples seem no longer confident enough in their own love to let their covenant hold them together, take them to work for each other or to receive with contentment whatever the other brings. Our taxation policy assumes that living alone is the norm, and living with your spouse and children the exception. So we have promoted singleness over life together in the covenant which we can enter freely, and so we have become dependents and employees of that other covenant that we have not entered freely, the state. The British economy is constituted by two covenants. There is UK GDP, which is the covenant of the domestic economy. And there is position of the UK in the global economy, which is the covenant of our economy with all other economies. It is for all other economies to decide, whether our view of ourselves is too high, and the valuations of British companies and UK stock-market are too high. This seems to be what the international stock-markets and money markets are now telling us. Our overseas investors suspect that our economy is not young and vigorous but old and sclerotic, that we have not been investing the funds they have lent us into new vigorous industrious enterprises, but simply stoking our housing market and raising our pension and welfare entitlements. If they think that we have over-valued the forms of trust that constitute the financial and other services we offer, and so over-valued ourselves, they will sell our stock and cease to trade in our markets. They will be our judges. If we do not believe in ourselves and in all the virtues and practices which have built our common (economic) life, why, our overseas investors may ask, should they? By running down the social capital generated by the covenant of marriage, have become so disassociated from one another that we don’t know how to pay for, or support financially, someone we love? Have we become so disassociated even from our own bodies that we despise manual work and don't know how to wield a broom, let alone a spanner? Our overseas investors will let us know. If we think it clever to short-cut on the truth, which is what these instruments of financial leverage and securitisation amount to, those who once thought Britain and London a reliable and virtuous place may simply go elsewhere, and our vaulted financial creativity, without financial self-control, will have ended the whole game. Overseas investors may decide that in these last decades we have simply been prettifying our national temple so that the UK

economy has simply become a dolls house. It is time to receive our correction from the global economy. Is it time for this temple that we have built to ourselves to be torn down? Should we be glad to see it torn down in order that another more modest but longer-lasting temple may be built? Behind this economic crisis is another crisis, one of morale. Have we become the society that each of us individually ceased to believe in? We have have assumed that the economy is an independent mechanism with no connection to any other factors, in particular those social factors that I have linked to covenant, to confidence and to the readiness of this society to create another generation and so to continue. We have not made the connection between economy and morale, and so we been taken by surprise by this financial crisis. Money is ultimately a matter of our confidence in ourselves and in other people’s confidence in us. If this society of ours hears about the covenant of God with man it will be a confident society, and its members will be confident to initiate their own covenants with one another. Then they will have reason to serve and to work, and so to invest in our society and its economy. When we do this, other people will do so too, and then our economy and our society have a future. 5. Saving and the future We have an economic crisis. We can’t fix this crisis with more money, because just what money is, is the problem. We have to fix money with something that is not money. The only way to fix it is with attitude, or more traditionally, with virtue. Let us run through the stages that brought us to this point. We have said that financial markets are about old people lending money to young people, and that declining numbers of young people means that there are fewer productive places for that lending to go, so that our savings have been placed unproductively and recklessly, and in place of real economic growth we have created only a massive overhang of debt. This financial crisis will not go away because the crisis of missing young people is going to worsen. If we confess no knowledge of any covenant, surrender to cultural pessimism and are disinclined to raise a next generation we cannot expect to enjoy a healthy economy. An economy is not an autonomous mechanism but an expression of its society. Our economic crisis is simply our own self-evaluation coming back to us. Credibility and crisis We have a crisis with money, and we need something that is not money to fix it. Let us look at the connection between present action and future outcome, and so between saving and economic prosperity. Saving simply means that you decide not to spend now but to keep some part of your income to spend later. You lend this money to someone. That someone wants to borrow it in order to take an initiative and start an enterprise. You both know that their enterprise may not work, and that if it does not, you will lose your money. Interest is your reward for your preparedness to lose your savings. If you decline to bear this risk there is no reason why you should receive any interest. The Church has always referred to the demand for interest without risk as usury: it is wrong to demand payment

when you are not offering something for it, such as taking responsibility for this risk. A year ago it suited all of us to believe that the credit boom could go on forever. We wanted others to believe that a national economy can continue to ride on borrowing, and enjoy increasing amounts of the fruit of that growth now before we have created it. as our mutual indebtedness grew, and consideration of risk was suppressed, this became increasingly implausible to each of us individually, but we did not care to say in public, nor did we decide not to take advantage of the unsustainably high return on offer. Market information was widely distorted or withheld; those responsible for overseeing the market, regulators, boards and shareholders, failed to do so. A prolonged lack of transparency or failure to tell the truth and insist that others be truth with us, meant that there has been no meaningful market here. Now we are experiencing a collective collapse of belief; no one knows what valuations to believe. The resulting breakdown in trust that has destroyed our fundamental asset, our reputation. We have been foisting delusion on people, and since we are still over-value, I do not believe that we have stopped doing so. We have all been complicit here. Restoration of the market requires more than apologies. It requires criminal and civil charges and trial in a court of law for some, confession and penitence for others, and no less than a conversion for all. We over-valued ourselves and are doing so still. But this is the result of a deep uncertainty about what our value really is. The same lack of confidence that has undermined our valuation of ourselves also encourages us to make wildly exaggerated valuations. Next week I shall examine how economics itself gives us only a greatly impoverished account of our public transactions, that allows us to assume that economy and society are entirely unrelated realms, so we cannot see that it is us that the market weighs and measures. We have to hear what we are worth from other people, not only from all around the world but even from future generations. This is only difficult for the society that has such little awareness of past or future, and which does not care to hear its valuation from the one who truly loves it, from God who called us into existence and bid us live. We must allow our estimation of ourselves to be questioned and shaped by the gospel. God presides over the assembly of the worshipping Church, and the Church hears his judgment. God asks us to judge ourselves and to offer judgment and mercy to one another, and he judges how well we do so. He offers us tuition in good judgment, so that we become good judges of one another. Through the discipling we may learn how to value ourselves truly and to estimate one another better. God asks us again and again to judge, leading us gently towards a more truthful estimation of ourselves. 6. Disappearing nation We said that one fundamental factor for any economy is demography. For decades it has been a given that the populations of Britain and the world are growing. It is now clear that this is not the case. In Europe growth is over, and in Russia and Eastern Europe, population is already falling back. No declining population ever had a growing economy. A population does not fall back smoothly and gently, for markets magnify these falls so that

its economy suffers a series of crashes. As our population contracts we are compensating by importing people from other economies. Our society has convinced its men and women into pouring so much of their effort into clambering up the mortgage ladder that they have been too busy to have children. , We bought the house in which to put the children, but our little temples are empty. Why is this? It was because we have put private good, without any definition or control on that good, before public good. We give no account of the claims of other people on us, because we believe that we are primarily on our own, not covenantal but solely single beings. The Christian tradition understands that generosity and justice should be considered together, and that no account of my good is complete when it does not offer an account of my community and its prospects. The Gospel that tells us that Jesus overthrew one temple in order to establish a better. ‘Zeal for your house will consume me. Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.’ Jesus overthrew the temple that was impoverishing the nation in order to make way for the temple that would serve and restore that nation. He is that temple, the meeting place of God and man, and the guarantor that man may meet and enter covenants with man. In every service of worship the Church publicly celebrates this gift of God, which makes all human society possible. It celebrates the dignity of the man who receives the gift of this covenant, and takes it as his invitation to act well, in public, with justice and generosity. We have said that freedom of one human being to give himself to another human being, and the freedom of that human being to receive him, is the foundation on which there is first society and second an economy. This original self-gift of one person to another reflects the absolute freedom in which God has given himself to man and brought man into covenant with himself. It is the basis on which there is the first economy of the family, and the second formal monetised economy in which we are customers and employees. Those who are convinced of the promise of eternal life, will be confident enough of the long-term to start families and take the initiatives that create social capital and sustain civil society. The Christian hope gives a society a sense of worth and permanence. 7. … and building the Temple again We heard from the Gospel of John that when he entered the temple in Jerusalem Jesus said to those assembled there, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. But, John tells us, ‘He was speaking of the temple of his body.’ In Jesus Christ mankind lifted up by God, built on the rock and established forever. Jesus Christ is the place where God camps with man and stays with him, the permanent temple of God for us. Christ refuses to let us substitute, idolatrise or be satisfied with any other temple. The Church asks whether we are selling ourselves here, in this ‘temple’ that we have built. Are we being sacrificed here? Are we being sold here, amongst the money-changers? The cross of Christ tests all these temples of our own construction. If they have become the places in which we are not built up but sold and sacrificed, they will not survive this testing. The construction that we have been working on has enfeebled us, and now its own

contradictions is beginning to bring it down. Can Christ restore what we have and build us a more permanent temple? The society that does not understand itself to be in covenant with God will experience wide swings between optimism and pessimism. Sometimes the mechanism of the economy will serve to tamp down these fluctuations, but when they become too great, the market will only serve to make them even wilder. But the society for which the concept of covenant is fundamental and holds on to the hope of redemption is able to accept how bad its situation is and how much it is in need of forgiveness. It cannot have a merely high or merely low view, but sees the cross and death through the promise of resurrection, and sees that the resurrection lies through the cross and death. We have come to reading from the epistle, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. In its opening chapter he tells us that The message of the cross is foolishness, that is, it seems like foolishness to those who are comfortable and convinced by a different, ‘economic’, logic. This message is received by faith. It is faith that secures your human freedom to acknowledge God, if you wish or to decide against God and thus not to know him if you do not wish. Nothing is foisted upon you. You do not have to hear the word that the Church passes on from Christ. But you may hear it, if you pray. It is only the Christian faith that insists that this faith is fundamental, and more basic than any form of ethnic belonging. The Church insists that man may judge for himself, in faith that God is his judge, and so may act for others, generously. He can be an economic agent if he has a high enough view of himself, and when he knows that he is loved he will have a high enough view. In these talks I have not described the economic or social teaching of the Church, nor prescribed any policies, political or economic. I have merely brought up some of the questions that the Church puts to the country. I have said that the Church is a little community that lives within the great community of Britain. It feels the power of the forces of disintegration tugging at Britain and it names them. The Church is held together by the love of God and so is unshakeable. It can only celebrate the resurrection which demonstrates this unbreakable covenant of God with man. It can ask these questions because it is confident that God is with man and that, however dire the testing that he puts himself through, man is loved and will be sustained and redeemed by God. The Church is on the way to Easter, experiencing the passion while celebrating the resurrection. Come with us. Summary 1. Man is the image of God. Man is the fundamental good of the economy. No other goods can substitute for him. 2. The Church insists on the unity and integrity of man. With the concept of covenant it provides the account of social cohesion lacked by the Humanities and social sciences. 3. People are the end and goal of all our activity. We work so that we have the means to be generous.

4. The society that does not hear the witness of the Church is liable to subordinate man to other ends. 5. Those who have no faith in eternity will be unable to take the risk of making themselves vulnerable. They will not want to make themselves (financially) dependent on a marriage partner. 6. Through expanding welfare we reduce expectations and personal autonomy, making it more difficult for people to act either for themselves or for others. 7. The state spreads in order to compensate for what we have not done for each other. It can spread but not withdraw. 8. The dissolution of each marriage makes the involuntary relationship of each of us to the state stronger. 9. The nation has not asked itself whether foreign investors will continue to finance our retreat from individual responsibility into centralised welfare. 10. The society that does not promote the production of children above any other economic good will suffer declining morale and declining population. 11. A declining population is reflected in economic crises. 12. The Church names the forces of disintegration at work in the nation. By pointing to the covenant of God with man it encourages the nation, and directs it away from its poor morale and self-inflicted misery.