From the Psalter:
We have heard with our ears, O God, our forefathers have told us,
the deeds you did in their days, in the days of old.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Psalm 44:1 (NRSV) – December 16, 2013.)
Today’s evening psalm begins with a verse reminiscent of the psalm verse from which my blog takes its name:
That which we have heard and known,
and what our forefathers have told us, *
we will not hide from their children. (Ps 78:3)
These psalms speak to the obligation of the generations to communicate from one to another the lore of the faith, the stories that make us who we are, the tales that cement the People of God together. This is a duty which is common across the gulfs of religion, culture, and nationality; any group of people which considers itself a unified society must communicate generation to generation the knowledge and the values around which the society coheres. One generation must tell and the next must listen; the older must teach; the younger, learn.
In the past few days two news items caught my attention. The first was a report of findings of sociologists that Americans are less mobile in the second decade of the 21st Century than we were 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. People in our country are not moving from place to place, not changing residences as frequently as they used to. Those doing the research did not venture an explanation of why this is, but they offered possible reasons including the much higher costs of relocation, the change from a manufacturing to a service economy, and the homogeneity of both the current workforce and the current job market. Whatever the reasons, the nation seems to be returning to a more settled way of life, perhaps one similar in some ways to the agrarian society of the nation’s youth. This means that stories of affinity and location, the tales that form neighborhoods and cultures, the social economy of the small community will become more important.
The second news item, however, suggests that settled communities and social economies are not forming, that they are instead being destroyed. The story concerned the way in which the large corporations that form the basis of our service and information based economy (Facebook, Google, Twitter, cell phone companies, and so forth) are moving into and taking over the urban landscape. Because these companies need large amounts of space, their entry into the urban real estate market as buyers drives up the cost of office and commercial space, often to a rate that small retailers, cafes, restaurants, and other local businesses cannot afford. This, in turn, leads those smaller businesses to go out of operation. In addition, these corporations are providing “full service campuses” for their employees – providing gymnasiums and recreational facilities, dining facilities, all the ancillary services previously provided by the smaller businesses. This exacerbates the small, local businesses’ problem and accelerates their demise. The full-service corporate campuses and the absence of those small retail firms, cafes, and restaurants mean that the normal “meeting places” of society are disappearing. The employees of different businesses, the constituencies of competing corporate societies no longer have either need or place to interact.
These two trends seem to me to be incompatible. As we become more settled and have greater need for the organs of society that create communal coherence, we are also being fractured by the economic engines driving us to be more settled; the corporations which undergird the service-information economy are (perhaps inadvertently) demolishing the small-business economy that fosters human community in settled societies.
Now someone will say, “But there is the internet. Those service-information corporations, through the internet, provide an alternative to the public spaces, the small-business and social interactions of earlier settled communities.” Yes, to an extent that is so. But the internet and social media cannot replace the one-on-one, the one-with-many flesh-and-blood interactions of humankind. We need those in-the-flesh moments, to see another’s face, to hear his or her inflections, tones-of-voice, sighs, and chuckles, even to smell his or her sweat, breath, or perfume.
I am not blaming the Googles, the Twitters, the Facebooks for the loss of what sociologist Robert Putnam called “social capital” (see Bowling Alone), but I am suggesting that it is our responsibility to use the technologies and media they offer in appropriate ways, ways that enhance rather than disrupt the formation and sustaining of human community. I am suggesting that the owners, executives, managers, employees, and customers of those corporations share in that responsibility.
We cannot with integrity and authenticity say that we “have heard with our ears [what] our forefathers have told us” if we have only seen a Tweet, viewed a Facebook page, or read a blog entry. We cannot with integrity and authenticity say that we are not hiding the story of our community from our children if we are not sharing that story with one another in person. If we are to sing these psalms authentically, we must tell with our own voices, hear with our own ears, see with our own eyes, not with those of technology. It is our corporate responsibility.
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
It never ceases to amaze me how directly Scripture can speak to the present day! The admonition to “Consider how you have fared,” and its description of an economy in a shambles, where the people work but do not enjoy the produce of their labor, continue to be hungry and thirsty, cannot find warmth, and find their earnings dribbling away to nothing, could be addressed to anyone anywhere in today’s world, I think. 
The devisers of our Episcopal Church Daily Office Lectionary were a clever bunch, weren’t they? 
I’m sitting here this morning knowing full well that I should be writing something about Advent and, truth be told, there are other parts of today’s daily readings that would lend themselves to an Advent reflection. But…. yesterday a federal court in Michigan decreed that the city of Detroit could carry on with a restructuring of its debt through bankruptcy and, more importantly and more destructively, that among the obligations that could be discharged are its pension responsibilities to former municipal employees. I was deeply troubled by that news when I heard it yesterday morning and I’ve been pondering it since.
Friday was a Holy Day in America! It was a day when all across the nation thousands, if not millions, of people breathed prayers of thanks. It was a day when all across the nation thousands, if not millions, improved the lives of many, many others. It was a day when news organizations from the smallest local radio station to international broadcast and cable conglomerates asked Americans across the nation, “How did you participate?” Yes, Friday was a Holy Day in America!
Read it carefully, it’s not what you think it is. It’s not what you expect. It’s not a call to make agricultural implements out of the weapons of war . . . it is quite literally the opposite!
This part of Isaiah was written shortly after the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon, which Cyrus of Persia had allowed in the middle of the 6th Century BCE. Isaiah (on God’s behalf) was promising two things with these images of laborers enjoying the fruits of their own efforts: first, that the people would no longer be (if not slaves) subjugated workers of foreign (or domestic) overlords and, second, that there would be peace. Israel’s and Judah’s history had been one of regular (if not constant) upheaval with invaders coming in and taking control of the vineyards and seizing the people’s lands and homes: the simple planting of vineyards with an expectation of enjoying the crop was a metaphor of peace and security. 
In last week’s sermon I talked about the first three prophetic visions God reveals to Amos: a plague of locusts devouring the crops of ancient Israel, a catastrophic fire destroying everything in the nation, and the plumb line set in the midst of the nation’s people demonstrating that they were not upright. This week Amos is shown a fourth prophetic vision. 
The nation’s legal system is corrupt; justice is for sale to the highest bidder. The guilty go free while the innocent suffer and die. The rich are crushing the poor. The affluent, the 1%-ers, are living a lavish life, with their costly perfumes and cosmetics, and their vacation homes with expensive furnishings, pleasure palaces where they can throw extravagant parties with music in every room. They revel in sexual debauchery of all sorts, but try to enforce a puritanical moral code on the rest of society. The poor are at the mercy of predatory lenders who exploit vulnerable families. The rich have more than enough to eat and to waste, while the poorest in the society go hungry. And government and religious leaders not only allow this to happen, they help it happen. 
Once again I find this serendipitous connection between one verse in the Daily Office psalm and a news item in the daily papers. Psalm 105 is divided into two parts and our lectionary bids us read the first at Morning Prayer and the second at Evening Prayer. The psalm describes the Hebrews sojourn in Egypt. Part One (vv. 1-22) describes the captivity of Joseph and his later elevation to leadership in the pharaoh’s court, which occasioned the children of Israel taking refuge in “the land of Ham” where they were subsequently enslaved. Part Two (vv. 23-45) tells the story of Moses, the Exodus, and the Hebrews coming into the Promised Land.
