The Daily Prophet

As they used to say on Monty Python's Flying Circus, "And now for something completely different..."

In other words, this blog isn't like anything I've ever written here.

When we moved to Little Rock from Virginia, Kate, then 5, asked, "Can we get one of those televisions that get channels?" So we plugged in the rabbit ears to our handmedown RCA. The few and often fuzzy channels we got were more than we'd ever had access to. But they obviously din't include Comedy Central.

After hearing about Jon Stewart's recent grilling of a CNBC commentator, I found the show on the internet. That show got this blog going. (Click here to watch it. Warning: it contains some thinly bleeped profanity.)

I think this was a prophetic moment.

It's news to most people that the Bible talks relatively little about sex, or what we call "family values". And most of the stories and teachings about sex and families would be scandalous to the folks who would present a middle class white Protestant American family from 1952 as the image of biblical perfection.

As I mentioned in a sermon on Sunday, what the Bible does talk a lot about is money and economics. Ingrained in the Torah, the Law, is a deep suspicion of the accumulation of too much wealth in the hands of too few. And a deep suspicion of making money just by having money. Charging interest was forbidden. Debts were forgiven every seven years. Property (which tends to gravitate towards a few) was to be redistributed every 50 years. The prophets repeat these warnings, more in the tenor of Jon Stewart. And my hunch is that the profanity was bleeped out of Isaiah as well.

Mr. Stewart's rage was towards managers and commentators like Jim Cramer who was caught on tape admitting that he and others in his business manipulated stock prices in order to make money. Piles of money. Some traders were just doing their jobs. But some were playing games with other people's money. Money earned by the real work of schoolteachers and electricians and business owners and all kinds of people whose wealth came from their work.

Jim Cramer advised people that a stock price might have nothing to do with the soundness of a company. It's not about whether a useful service or good work is provided. Buy a stock only if you think tomorrow somebody else will be convinced to pay more for it. It's wealth without work, unless manipulating stock prices by a hedge fund manager passes for work.

The point of this tirade is that it doesn't, or it shouldn't.

The new state lottery is something that can raise a lot of moral indignation on both sides. Some people have scruples about gambling. Some people say it's a way to fund scholarships in which people can choose freely whether or not to participate. But my concern is about the increasing notion that wealth comes out of nowhere. Which is precisely the myth promoted by the likes of Jim Cramer.

Long ago we started seeing ourselves primarily as consumers rather than producers. At what point will our economy seem to be a lottery to most of us, having almost nothing to do with what we each actually have to offer? When will we have lost the connection entirely between our work and our wealth?

The most important moral formation that goes on in our lives is not the formation that makes us say no when tempted to start a Ponzi scheme. Few of us will ever be so tempted. More important is the formation that cares about the consequences of our work and our wealth on other people. Moral formation is not about knowing the boundaries of the law (see "Mount, Sermon on the" by Jesus), or knowing allowable ways to make money in a market. Moral formation means learning in ever deepening ways that our lives and our choices matter to one another and giving all of those ways our attention.

Moral formation means putting away the convenient illusion (at least until now) that the free market will tell us what is good, and reviving the responsibility we have for imposing goodness on our markets in every exchange that we make.

Here ends the rant. Next week's topic: Something nicer.