Hilton Head Island, SC – January 8, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Proverbs 4:10-19; Proverbs 4:20-27
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil. – Proverbs 4:27
There are no scripture passages which refer directly to the issue which shall be addressed in this sermon. I shall be talking about a growing problem throughout the world, namely, that there are increasing hundreds of millions of young people, from age 18 through 30 or 35 years of age, who are unemployed or grossly underemployed, many of whom have excellent educations. Some of them are people with bachelors or masters or doctoral degrees who are driving taxis (until Uber and Lyft take their jobs from them) or are flipping hamburgers at McDonalds or are employed in offices or factories at minimum wages. In many countries, a minimum wage means a dollar or two per hour, if it even means that.
In biblical times, there was no such problem. The economy was a subsistence economy for the most part, which meant that everyone was needed to work on peasant farms or on land owned by large and wealthy landowners or in small shops in villages. There was no unemployment, because everyone had a job doing something, however menial the job might be.
Nevertheless, even though the Bible said very little to or about the young, it does give a few instructions to young people, especially in the Book of Proverbs. We saw examples of that in all three of our scripture readings today, the responsive reading and the two other readings from the Proverbs. I shall refer briefly to them, but as I said, they do not speak to the unique challenges being faced by 21st-century young people.
In the responsive reading, which comes from Proverbs 3, the writer urges his son to seek and to maintain “sound wisdom and discretion.” That is good advice for anyone, but particularly for young men and women who are preparing themselves for life in the adult world. Unfortunately, in our world, if the young can’t find employment, the primary benefit of wisdom is that it might possibly prevent such young adults from turning their growing frustrations into foolish actions. Otherwise, it is difficult to put wisdom to good use if the one who possesses wisdom is shunted to the sidelines in the competition for an occupation.
In Proverbs 4, we hear the writer exhorting his son not to enter the path of the wicked, or to walk in the way of evil men. Further, he is told to put away crooked speech and to put devious talk far from himself. What this father seems to be warning his son about is what all of our parents told us when we were teenagers: Stay away from “the wrong kind of people.”
And who are (or were) the wrong kind of people? Well, for those of us who can still resurrect memories from our high school years, the wrong kind of people who were the “fast” crowd. They drove cars too fast, they were too fast in their behavior, especially behavior between girls and boys, they didn’t properly attend to their studies, and they generally were “up to no good.” They were the kind who wore a white tee shirt with a pack of Lucky Strikes rolled up in the sleeve, and they had faded Levis with no belt – no belt, no less. We were warned to watch out for such pills among our peers.
The old sitcom Happy Days characterized what it meant to be young in the Fifties. Nobody was really bad on Happy Days, and the Fonz was the only one of the whole bunch who even gave off a hint of potentially questionable behavior.
All over the world there are relatively few happy days for millions upon millions of recent high school or college graduates. They can’t find work, and young people who can’t find work are far more likely to find trouble or overtly to create it. This is especially true in what used to be called the “Third World.” In today’s terms, that means those nations which are economically undeveloped or underdeveloped in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But the problem also exists in Western Europe, North America, and Australia as well.
In many Arab and African countries, and in some nations of Central and South America, the unemployment rate among young adults is from 40 to 60%. That simply is a demographically untenable situation. Those in their late teens or twenties or early thirties have been wanting and expecting to take their place in the world in the workforce. If they are shut out, many of them will inevitably turn their energies into anti-social behavior: crime, drugs, sex, and hustling of every conceivable variety.
Up to a generation ago, where ideological socialism still existed in several nations, everyone was guaranteed a job. It might not have been a good-paying job, but at least it was a job. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, socialism began to collapse nearly everywhere it had been tried. Sadly, capitalism or state-sponsored capitalism has never seen fit to guarantee employment to everyone who wants it. Furthermore, international capitalism tends not to hire young workers and to --- in the vernacular --- “let go” older workers. Employed people from 30 to 55can keep their jobs, because they are the most experienced and productive workers, but the young have no experience, and older workers who are let go avoid pension or health problems for their employers. Still, it is the young, the ones who can’t crack into the system, who are the most disadvantaged. They also are the most frustrated by economic and employment barriers.
On top of all this, technology is making it increasingly difficult to find or to keep a job for anyone of any age. Automation has been going on for many decades, but now robotics and computers are displacing increasing millions of workers throughout the developed and underdeveloped world. It isn’t that jobs are going to Mexico or China or elsewhere. If technology can lower the costs of production at the expense of workers, it will almost certainly happen. The “bottom line” is the bottom line in capitalism. That is how it works, and capitalism has worked very well in advancing the standard of living of virtually everyone in the world, even the unemployed. But what are we to do about the legions of workers who lose their jobs to technology, especially young would-be workers who have never even been offered a job?
I can’t think of a single college classmate who did not find work very quickly after graduation, not one. Admittedly the late Fifties and early Sixties were good times economically, so no doubt it may have been easier to get a job. But any young Americans who graduated from high school or college in the last ten years or so know numerous classmates who still do not have jobs that pay enough to live on. Thus many of them move back in with Dad and Mom, which is probably a severe shock to Dad and Mom as well as a very awkward situation for everyone in the suddenly re-expanded family.
Among those who attend The Chapel Without Walls there are grandparents who have grandchildren who either have no jobs or low-paying jobs. The current younger generation is the first generation in all of American history who, on average, economically and financially shall be worse off than their parents. For people who grew up with the tacit expectation they would outperform their parents in employment and income, and it will not happen, that is an enormous psychological and existential downer. Young people of today are much less optimistic about the future than are older people. A majority of the young either believe they will receive no Social Security or markedly reduced Social Security. And of course unless they all eventually get jobs, they will definitely have no Social Security at all.
If you have not already done so, you may be asking yourself, “Is this s sermon?” It is, or at least I hope it is. But it is a sermon with a theme that few people readily recognize. God did not create us to be isolated individuals. He created us to be individuals in community. As Christians we need to be concerned with everyone in our midst, and everyone in the world community. The challenges faced by the young are less pressing in the USA than in much of the rest of the world, but even here the young are getting a smaller and smaller piece of the communal fiscal pie. That is not only sad, it is potentially destabilizing. Unless things improve for them, young people may organize to revolt against what they perceive to be injustices perpetrated by the older population against them. The high percentage of young people who voted for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the primaries and for Mr. Trump in the general election should alert Americans to the unrest our younger citizens are feeling.
Many of the young have long since given up on organized religion where they might hear a sermon such as this. And not hearing this concern widely expressed elsewhere, they may conclude they have no choice but to strike out against the larger society which they feel is overtly or covertly oppressing them.
What is the age range of most of the terrorists in the world? It is 18 to 30 or 35. They are the ones who feel the most disaffected and the least socially integrated. Therefore they are the ones who are the most likely to engage in antisocial carnage. All nineteen 9/11 airplane highjackers were in that age range. The ones who attacked the hotel in Mumbai were in that age range. The couple who shot up the Christmas party in San Bernardino; the man who drove the semi-truck into the happy crowd on Bastille Day last summer in Nice, France; the shooter in the Orlando gay nightclub; the driver of the truck in Berlin; the shooter in the Istanbul nightclub: they were all in that age range. And with the exception of the one female in that particular list of terrorists, all of the others were young men. They have gallons of testosterone surging through them, they cannot afford to get married, they have few contacts with young women because they cannot afford such contacts, and one day, lured into it by older and more cynical and sinister males, or with a burst of ideological imbalance or from being psychologically on edge for too long, they take arms against their sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them.
Many such disturbed young men do not vote. Some of them live in autocratic nations where there is no voting, or where votes do not really count. But many who live in nations where voting matters may vote for candidates who make promises which older and wiser citizens know cannot be kept. And so the despondency and despair of some of these young men, which is their social dis-ease, continues to grow.
For the sake of the world’s young people, who increasingly are shut out of the larger society largely by economic forces, structural changes must be made in the way society operates. If technology and computers are going to displace or replace more and more workers, governments are going to need to establish a minimum guaranteed living standard for all citizens. When people truly cannot find work, they must be provided a means of living in minimal comfort. When those at the top benefit greatly from the labors (or existence) of everyone underneath, then everyone underneath must be assisted by those at the top. Everyone somehow needs to be assured a life without constant concern about where the next meal is coming from. To those to whom much is given, of them will much be required. It shall be the one per cent who must pay much higher taxes in order for them to remain in the one per cent. That certainly is not laissez faire capitalism, but it is one of the primary means of maintaining social order in the anything-but-brave new world of a high rate of unemployment among a sizeable percentage of the populace.
Do you remember how, at the beginning of this sermon (if such it is) that I said the Bible doesn’t speak directly to the issue being talked about here? In my judgment it doesn’t. However, the text for the sermon does refer to the particular plight of 21st young people, albeit unintentionally. Traditionally the writer of the Proverbs was thought to be King Solomon. Most modern scholars reject that notion. Whoever it was who wrote these words, in conclusion he said to his son (if indeed it was his son), “Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil” (4:27).
Surely what the writer meant by that is that his child should stay on the straight and narrow path of righteousness. Don’t deviate from it. Don’t zig-zag your way through life; keep focused on what is proper and good and wholesome.
In our time, however, “right” and “left” have taken on a far different meaning. “Right” and “left” are now politically and economically charged words. For the young (or anyone else) to go to the right means to follow the pied pipers of conservative politics and economics. For anyone to go to the left means to follow the pied pipers of liberal politics and economics. For a year and a half during the presidential primaries the American people were subjected to ideas mainly of the right or left, with little thought given to the middle ground. There was too little thought about how actually to accomplish things rather than merely to talk about things.
Since November 8 we have been subjected to far too much posturing on the right and on the left. What must be done and what can be done: Those are the issues which should be debated now by the new Congress and our President-Elect. And one of the issues which especially needs to be discussed is what plans we have to improve the lives and the prospects of America’s younger citizens.
But what can you or I, personally, do about this enormous worldwide question? To be sure, none of us is in an authoritative position to make the economic or political changes necessary to provide for a more productive future for our nation’s young. But we can try to influence those who do have such positions to consider this huge international problem which is being addressed almost not at all by anybody.
There is one thing all of us can personally do, however. We can encourage our grandchildren, if we have any, to get an education. We can help to finance that education. We can encourage other young people we know to seek the best education possible, and not to lose heart in their search for satisfying employment.
God has placed us in a global community. Let us remember the young leaders of tomorrow in that community, lest the community collapse because it will not be cohesive enough for them to lead it. They, along with all young people of all times, would be building temples still undone. Let us do whatever we can to assist them in the construction process.