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.