As I mentioned in the newsletter, my oldest daughter just had her birthday, her 37th. This afternoon I'm going to join her and other members of my family for a birthday celebration. It will be a feast, around a table laden with delicious food and drink, and with gifts for Sue from all of us who love her. She and I and everyone who will be at that table have been extremely fortunate, not only in having such celebrations and assurances that we're cared for, but by always having the basic necessities of food and shelter. Sue's father knew what the hunger of poverty was like and Sue, as a single mother, has had to work extremely hard for the necessities, but she and I and the rest of the family have always had enough to eat. That divides us from a large part of the world in which simple physical survival is an ongoing struggle. I believe that as people committed to "the goal of world community, with peace, liberty and justice for all" we need to think about our privileged position, and I invite you to do that with me this morning. How can we make a place at the table for everyone?

There are people who argue persuasively (and perhaps many of you would agree) that we must care about those closest to us before we turn our attention to the wider world. As I've pondered this, I've come to see an intimate connection between our ability as individuals to care for those near to us and our ability as ethnic groups or nations or races to care for each other. I don't entirely agree that we must get everything perfectly together at home before we can look outside, because I think we all choose narrower or wider degrees of focus for our concerns, with perfect validity, just as the interests of a microbiologist and an astrophysicist are equally valid. But I do agree that if we can't find ways to feed our nearest and dearest we don't have much hope of solving the problems of world hunger. There are close connections between making a place at the table for people in this congregation, in Canada, and in the world -- and I suggest that none of those endeavours is easy or simple, but that they're all important and all dependent on the same general principles. And those principles confront the same big difficulty at all levels, from the congregational to the national to the international. They require a willingness to surrender some of our own comfort, and that's never easy.

I know that speaking about justice on a large scale may be perceived with some validity as hypocritical if the speaker is as imperfect as I am, and I confess that it's no easier for me than for any of you to know how best to make a place at the table for people close by or people far away, let alone to actually make that place when I do know how to do it. I don't always know how best to use the small Discretionary Fund that we have in this congregation, for example. I'm not eager to have less to eat in order that someone else can be fed. I don't even want to be reminded, while I'm eating that birthday dinner with Sue tonight, of those millions of children who go to bed hungry each night. I don't want it, but I think it may be called for. I strongly suspect I'm not going to change overnight into a saint, but perhaps I can change a bit, perhaps we all can, in the attitude we take towards the fact that billions of people in our world have no place at our richly-laden table. One thing I try to remember is that my present abundance has absolutely nothing to do with any merit of my mine; I'm sure of that; it's simply a matter of luck.

Now, how can we share the good luck more equitably, in accordance with our Unitarian Universalist principles of justice, equity and compassion in human relations? My thinking about this question is going to sound political to many of you, and it is, in the sense of being about how the world, and the nations and other groups within it, are governed. I don't at all subscribe to the idea that religion and politics can be separated. Indeed, I think there's a huge overlap between them, especially in a movement like ours which is more about how we live in this world than about concern with any life beyond the present one. Our Unitarian Universalist roots, particularly those roots in Judaism, Christianity and the Humanist tradition, are about how best we can love our neighbour and mobilize our human potential in the work for a better world, and those things translate into action which is in the broadest sense political. But it's up to each of us to determine what form that action will take; we are not, as Unitarian Universalists, political in the narrower sense of being aligned with any political party.

So when I reflect with you this morning about how we may best work towards a world where there's a place at the table for everyone, I hope you will know that I'm talking politics in that broad sense of concern for how society is organized, but not in that narrow sense of parties and partisanship. Those of you who were here last week heard me quote a letter which UU minister David Rankin once received, and I think it's worth repeating here. It read something like this,

Dear Sir:
Politics has no place in the pulpit. When you said that in choosing between Al Gore and George Bush we should vote for the best man, you were obviously attacking the Republicans.

Well, I assure you I don't intend to attack any particular politician or party this morning, but I do want to suggest some of the considerations which I believe can usefully inform both our ethics and our politics, and to suggest that those two things are not far apart at all.

I recently started to subscribe to the "Monitor", which is the journal of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and my thinking on this subject was stimulated by an article in their March issue by Ed Finn. Finn reminds us that more than 50 years ago, Mahatma Gandhi remarked that "the world holds enough to satisfy everyone's need, but not everyone's greed," a statement which encapsulated the main cause of most of the world's social and economic problems at the time and, I suggest, now too, as we enter the third millennium. Poverty, hunger, homelessness, preventable disease, polluted air and water, and most of the other ills which beset humanity (other than natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods) have one root cause, Ed Finn suggests, and so do I. That one root cause is the inequitable distribution of the planet's wealth and resources. If distribution were according to need, not greed, there would be a place at the table for everyone.

If you were here last week, you may remember me quoting the humorist Dave Barry on poverty. He said, Now the problem poor people have is that they don't have enough money for food, housing or medical care. The simple, obvious, efficient way for the government to help them is to give them money so they can buy these things. So that is not how the government does it.

True! Horribly true, although of course it's too simple in light of the complicated histories and contexts which always go along with poverty. But there's solid truth in the concept that what we really want, if we really believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, is for the poor not to be poor. There are some glaringly obvious facts about today's world, and I suppose they've always been true: People who have enough money, no matter where in the world they live, do not go hungry. Famines do not break out in upscale residential neighbourhoods. Business executives don't habitually visit food banks or sleep under bridges. The rich stay healthy and live longer than the poor. These simple truths underscore the equally obvious fact (according to Finn, and I agree) that the answer to economic injustice is to allocate the world's wealth on an equitable basis -- to make room at the table for everyone.

Unfortunately, the economic system that now predominates in most parts of the world promotes an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth rather than doing anything to make it fairer. Here in Canada, most of the recent budgets, at the federal and provincial levels, with their emphasis on tax cuts, reinforce this fact rather than reducing it. Some tax cuts do provide relief to low income Canadians, but the gap between rich and poor individuals is made wider by the proportionately larger tax benefits to higher income earners.

One of the big factors at work in this widening separation between rich and poor seems to be simple greed. That sounds like such an ugly word to me, and yet it's not only being acknowledged today as part of our psyches, which I agree with -- I know it's part of me, just as envy and hostility are -- but is portrayed as valid and acceptable, which it surely is not. Certainly no-one can doubt the pervasive and pernicious existence of greed, when we have game shows that glorify it so overtly, and a whole structure and system of advertising built on persuading us to want more of everything, but does this mean we should no longer even try to overcome it?

We have a world in which the three top executives of Microsoft -- and Bill Gates' recent legal loss hardly affects this at all -- three people control more wealth than all the people in the world's poorest 50 countries. We have 300 billionaires with more wealth than the poorest two-and-a-half billion people. And the proponents of this grossly inequitable system see nothing wrong with it. That's what a free market is all about, they would tell us. In a system based on survival of the financially fittest, the financially unfit don't survive -- and don't deserve to.

This application of the law of the jungle to human society is not new. It reigned supreme in the 1800s when the "robber barons" of business were free to exploit the world's resources and workers for their own enrichment and that of their shareholders. Poverty, hunger, and homelessness were rampant then, too, among the general population. Then the first three-quarters of the 20th century saw the emergence of governments and unions committed to the alleviation of poverty and hunger -- that is, to a fairer distribution of wealth. Gradually, through most of the last century, the lives of workers and their families, at least in the industrialized nations, were improved by the implementation of a wide range of social programmes. And these programmes were funded largely by taking bigger and bigger amounts from the most affluent individuals and companies, by graduated income taxes and corporate taxation.

One of the lessons of this redistribution by governments was that it's not absolutely necessary to get rid of capitalism in order for countries to become more just towards their own citizens. It's possible to offset capitalism's inherently unequal distribution of income through socially progressive legislation, a fair tax system,and strong, government-supported unions. In such a system, if it were in effect today, Bill Gates would still be free to amass $100 billion, but he'd be taxed at a rate of 99.5%. That would leave him with a mere $500 million on which to eke out a living, while freeing $99.5 billion for an effective attack on world poverty.

It seemed for a while, especially in the first three decades after World War II, that corporate leaders and investors were resigned to constraints on their greed. But in the mid-70s came the promotion of globalized "free" trade and at the same time the development of new computer and communications technologies. Corporations were able to escape from national limits and boundaries -- and from any requirement to keep sharing their profits with the less fortunate. Along with the corporations' enormous increase in wealth came the power to buy and control most politicians. Instead of being the major means of redistributing income, governments began to be the agents of big business. They now often seem to be about helping the rich become richer at the expense of everyone else. In addition, now that employers are willing and able to relocate to places where labour costs are low, most unions have also been weakened. The role of organized labour in achieving a more equal distribution of wealth has been reduced, along with the role of governments.

Big business often tries to argue that there just isn't enough money any more to finance social security. In fact, looking at the Canadian situation, this country's economy today generates one-and-a-half times more wealth in per capita terms and constant dollars than it did in the early 1970s, when there seemed to be no question about our ability to afford social programmes. All that's different today is that most of the extra money is being concentrated in fewer and fewer bank accounts. The upshot is that the function of redistributing wealth has mainly taken the form of charity. These days, thousands of charitable organizations, including churches and other faith groups, now beg the corporations and high and middle income earners to share some of their income with the needy. Appeals for charitable donations clog the mails, the airwaves and the telephone lines.

All of the causes championed by charities are worthwhile. All of the hungry and destitute they help are deserving. But their growing dependence on handouts has two major flaws: it perpetuates a system built on avarice and inequality; and it ensures that the problems of poverty and hunger will persist and even get worse because the proceeds of charity alone will never be enough to solve them. What we need to recognize, I believe, if we're truly concerned about justice, equity and compassion in human relations, and a place at the table for everyone, is that these ideals depend on a different structure of human relations in which we take responsibility for one another, not only individually but as societies. The only way in which we can take that joint responsibility is through those structures which have been developed to make social justice possible -- that is, through our participation in politics at all levels, from how we decide about the future of this congregation to how we decide about the future of our country our world by who we elect to office.

And that brings me back to the story from UU Minister David Rankin, whose parishioner accused him of attacking the Republicans because Rankin had urged his hearers to vote for the best candidate for the job. Only you can decide who's the right person, or what's the right platform, or which is the right system for providing a place at the table for everyone. But I suggest to you that it's important to get involved with the processes and structures concerned with bringing that about. It's also important, I believe, to keep in mind what may be the world's greatest problem, an unfair distribution of wealth, and the solution -- however it may be achieved -- which is a fair distribution of wealth. As I wrote to the Mayor and Councillors of Centre Wellington recently, about the race-track /slot-machines issue,

"It's not worth it to us as individuals or as a community to invest in activities which are about randomizing the distribution of wealth rather than giving it some fairness and equity ..... about increasing the gap between rich and poor rather than narrowing it. It's not worth it to shape a world in which justice becomes more and more subordinated to greed and thoughtlessness. It's simply not worth the burden on our souls. Our community deserves better than a game of lucky numbers. It deserves the vision ...... of a better world, not of slot machines but of "justice, equity and compassion in human relations."

You've probably heard me say before that I almost certainly learn more than you do by preparing and giving these Sunday talks. It's true of this one, and it will translate into at least one small action, perhaps no bigger than a butterfly's wing-beat. As I was writing these words yesterday, I decided that whenever I take part in a feast such this evening's birthday party for my daughter, I shall try to make a guess at the cost of my share of the food, and will donate that amount to the political party of my choice. As expressed in words I love by Edward Everett Hale,

I am only one, but still, I am one.
I cannot do everything, but still, I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

So may we make a place at the table for the world, for each other. So may it be.