“A Cup of Common Good”
A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Epiphany (RCL Year C)
January 14, 2007
Psalm 36, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, John 2:1-11
Rev. Larry Lange
Grace Evangelical Lutheran Congregation
Green Bay, Wisconsin
Today’s lessons are about abundance.
The Psalm is about the abundance of God’s love and faithfulness and the abundant feast God provides for all of his creatures through all of creation.
In the Gospel Jesus provides an abundance of wine.
Now you might think Jesus was giving the green light to party hardy. But that’s not really the kind of abundance that story is all about. If the wine had run out early in that story the bridegroom’s family would have thrown a lame wedding celebration and that would have been seen as a public insult directed at the bride’s family. In small communities, such public insults go a long way, have long-reaching, negative effects. The couple’s entire marriage could have easily been overshadowed by the ill will generated over such a public insult.
When Jesus turned the water into wine, he averted this community disaster, sustained the joy of the wedding celebration, and helped keep the potential for a happy marriage for the couple alive.
God’s will is indeed that our marriages, our neighborhoods, our cities are all relationships that are full of abundant, joyful sharing and peace.
But that is not always the case. We are all too aware of how war, starvation, poverty, and crime haunt our world, even our own city. If these realities are not God’s will for humankind why does God allow them to happen?
This sort of question is a convenient way of taking the focus off the true source of these tragic realities in this world and trying to pin the blame on God. What is the source of these tragic realities in this world?
We can learn a bit about that from the Apostle Paul in the second lesson. The second lesson is also about abundance: the abundance in the body of Christ of God-given, God-activated gifts.
There are many kinds of gifts. Everyone has at least one gift. God gives us gifts and activates them and directs them for the purpose of the common good.
The common good is about sharing in God’s abundance. The common good is always an endangered concept.
One example.
A lot of people drink coffee. Second only to oil, coffee is the most traded commodity in the world—a sixty billion dollar business annually. Even if you don’t drink coffee, it’s a huge economic factor in the world. Twenty-five million people grow coffee. Coffee is a gift of God’s abundant creation in tropical countries that can help people there make a living and provide for their families.
Now if you buy coffee at the grocery store, the price you pay goes to pay many different companies: the grocery store, the food distributor, the coffee company, coffee exporters and brokers, coffee processors, local coffee buyers, and last and least, the farmer who actually grows the stuff. All these individuals and companies need to make money from coffee. So their purpose is to buy it as cheaply as possible and sell it at high enough prices that they can pay their employees and expenses. Simple economics. Nothing intrinsically evil or irrational about this system. Somehow you have to get coffee out of a bean in Costa Rica into a cup in your kitchen. Takes a lot of people to do that.
However. Because all these people are involved and because no one is going to buy a pound of coffee for $20 somebody’s got to take the hit, and the most vulnerable person in the long line of people making money from coffee is the farmer. Farmers don’t have buildings full of MBA’s and legal departments to protect their interests. In the coffee-business-as-usual farmers take what they can get. In the coffee-business-as-usual no one is looking out for farmers. All parties are looking out for themselves. In the coffee-business-as-usual no one is thinking about the common good.
But there is a common good way of buying coffee. It’s the coffee sold at church every first weekend of the month. Maybe you’ve been wondering for a long time why in the hec we’re selling coffee in a church. Here’s why.
In this common good coffee business there are only three players: the farmer, the cooperative to which the farmer belongs and a company called Equal Exchange. Equal Exchange does have the common good in mind. It has the common good of the farmers and their communities in mind. Equal Exchange works with local farmer cooperatives to make sure the price paid to farmers is one that covers their costs, so that those farmers can invest in their communities, so that those farmers can farm organically and protect their land and water, and so their children can have more adequate food and shelter, medical care, and education.
That doesn’t happen in the coffee-business-as-usual. When it’s business as usual the average ratio between the highest paid employee and the lowest paid employee is 360 to 1.
At Equal Exchange it’s only 4 to 1.
When it’s coffee-business-as-usual, there are many corporations taking this kind of money out of the system, and it’s very easy to see why there’s no money left for the farmers.
If you buy coffee from the coffee business as usual companies your money does not help the farmers who grow your coffee. If you buy coffee from the coffee-business-as-usual companies, you are not able to contribute to the common good.
When coffee corporations need to grab all the profits they can for a few highly paid individuals, millions of farmers suffer; the common good is not achieved. Similar forms of inefficiency and greed are one of the causes of poverty and hunger in this world.
But when the common good is the goal, everyone gets a more just share. Having the common good as a goal is not the end capitalism. Having the common good as a goal is simply the beginning of shared abundance for poor farmers. That’s why Lutheran World Relief works with Equal Exchange to support their efforts. Lutheran World Relief sees Equal Exchange as one way to help share more fairly the abundance of God’s creation. Lutheran World Relief sees Equal Exchange as one small way of sharing our gifts for the common good, as one small way of trying to establish and maintain a joyful, peaceful global community.
There are a few preachers nowadays who are claiming that if individual Christians are faithful, they are rewarded with happy, abundant lives. All the lessons today remind us that happiness and abundance are not rewards for individuals for individual faithfulness. Happiness and abundance are God’s will for all people. Happiness and abundance happen when people share their God-given gifts for the common good. That’s how Jesus made joyful abundance happen at a wedding in Cana.
You know what kind of executive salary Jesus received for his individual faithfulness. Jesus took no salary for the cross for his faithfulness to us. But now, as his corporation, our pension plan is out of this world. Jesus’ giving has opened the door for all people in this world to take refuge in the shadow of God’s wings. And when God descends as the Holy Spirit and activates your gifts for the common good, that’s how joyful abundance still happens today here in our congregation, here in our community, little by little, and even in as little a thing as a cup of coffee.
Amen.