Jesus says, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Putting our money (and often our sense of security for the future) into something attaches us emotionally to that thing and we want to see it do well. We attach our well-being to its well-being.

401(k) Anxiety

One of the most consistent narratives pounded into our heads as key to being a responsible person is that you ought to be planning for retirement. Many employers even match retirement investment as a benefit to incentivize it. Most middle-class individuals’ primary lens on the economy is how the stock market is doing, particularly their 401(k). Many keep a watchful eye on the ups-and-downs of that ever-changing line, and their anxiety levels fluctuate in an upside-down inversion of the market.

What gets less attention is what is actually happening underneath the top-line numbers of your retirement account. When your account goes up, what are you really profiting from? What real-world dynamics do the magic of 8% annual gains and compounding benefits of investing in your 20's rely on?

Are You the Owners You’re Protesting?

You might be critical of the practices of Big Tech or out protesting Tesla as Elon Musk rips apart the government, but you might just be protesting yourself. Institutional funds like your retirement funds are some of the biggest shareholders of the corporations dominating the American landscape.

Take Vanguard for example, the #2 shareholder of Tesla behind Elon Musk and one of the biggest retirement fund and investment companies in the world. Like many others, my employer runs its retirement funds through Vanguard, so I've been looking into the investment options we have for those funds. The default fund they’d suggest for me, based on my age, is a mix that focuses primarily on stocks, with the “Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Institutional Plus Shares” as the largest holding. I find that by going to the investment options on Vanguard’s site and navigating to that fund's portfolio. With a couple extra steps, I can see what companies that fund is currently invested in. I search online for that fund title, which comes up easily. Selecting the top result, I can find a Portfolio section that lists out the fund’s holdings.

If I took no action, my retirement fund would make me a part owner of:
Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia (big AI company), Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Tesla - all part of the top 10 holdings.

In that case, I’m depending for my retirement on these companies making a profit, which they generally do by exploiting the labor of workers, exploiting the environment, and exploiting the emotional insecurities and data of consumers. If I then protest these companies and their practices, I'm protesting myself and working against my own financial interests. If I say I want the government to create an environment that doesn’t hurt my retirement fund, I’m really saying I want them to enact policy that causes Big Tech, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk to profit, though I might not realize it.

Ok, Now What?

So, what options do I have? What can I do with my retirement funds, and how can I plan for the future without placing my treasure and my hope into the very companies tearing our world’s future apart?

Vanguard, and most retirement funds, don’t offer great options for getting out of this cycle. The best I can come up with there is placing our funds entirely into bond funds. These are low-risk options typically recommended for those about to reach retirement because their average rate of return is much lower than the stock-focused funds. So here, I’m choosing to forgo options where I'd make more money over time. One benefit is that I’m much less subject to the ups and downs of the market. As others panic over the market having a bad day, these funds hold steady. Bond funds basically are a loan to local, state, and national governments or to government-backed housing mortgages that are slowly paid back to the bond funds over time, bringing a small profit to the bond holders. So basically we're invested in a mix of people's home loans and local government infrastructure for the most part, which isn't perfect, but seems a bit less morally questionable than other options.

But is a 401(k) really our best hope for a secure future? Jesus’ disciples didn’t have them, so what were they relying on?

The Jesus Retirement Plan

I think Jesus’ parable of the shrewd manager in Luke 16 as well as some other stories from Jesus give us clues. Interpreters often struggle with what exactly to do with the parable of the shrewd manager. Is Jesus blessing dishonesty? What exactly is happening here? Very briefly, Jesus tells a story where a landowner dismisses his manager and demands the accounting records. I won’t go into deep detail, but K. C. Richardson argues it’s plausible from the text that the audience would have understood the manager to have been distributing the landlord's excess to the poor or the tenant farmers. The manager sees potential doom approaching and calls in the tenant farmers, reducing their debts to the landlord, gaining favor with them and creating a relational safety net of mutual aid that will take care of him in the future. The owner has to accept the situation to protect his own honor, and Jesus applauds the manager for his wisdom in using resources to gain friends. It seems Jesus is recommending that instead of using wealth to build up treasure (like the rich man Jesus condemns for his stockpiling in his story in Luke 12:16-21 or the rich man who Jesus challenges to distribute his excess in Luke 18:18-30), we ought to use whatever resources (money, influence, skills) we have to take care of others and form a web of interdependence which not only redistributes to take care of those in need but also provides a safety net for ourselves in the future.

This is what we see the early church engaged in through the book of Acts as well. Richardson argues the church was taking social structures that were normal in the interdependent village communities (with intertwined family networks that cared for one another and norms of any excess wealth being shared to meet subsistence needs in the community) and applying them in urban contexts where those structures were not functioning, kinship networks had been scattered, and the wealthy neglected those who were on the margins. The church practiced mutual aid and formed a fictive kinship network, a “found family” based on loyalty to Jesus. Jesus’ teachings and the church’s practice called the growing urban middle class (like the manager) out of the pursuit of upward mobility popular in the city and into village-like patterns of collective care. Stockpiling was to be rejected and resources were to be invested into mutual aid that was both subsistence-provision for those crushed by the economics of the Roman Empire and an investment in a community that programmatically cared for its elders as they aged out of being able to care for themselves.

Mutual aid and the rejection of stockpiling wealth was not only core to Jesus’ teaching but a major focus throughout the New Testament and the plan the early church relied upon to care for elders.

How might we use our resources to care for others and form networks of care that will last into our own old age and care for us? Figuring this out in today's world is a big project, and one that requires others to cooperate, but can we start to take simple steps in that direction today?

See Early Christian Care for the Poor by K. C. Richardson.

Photo by Mylo Kaye on Unsplash

Taking Action: Palestine and Divestment

Israel recently restarted all-out attack on Gaza. They’d been cutting off electricity, including power for water desalinization plants providing most of Gaza’s water supply, as well as blocking food aid and temporary housing units waiting at the border for weeks. Murders in Gaza never fully stopped during the ceasefire, and Israel has simultaneously been carrying out attacks in Lebanon in violation of another ceasefire and conducting an invasion of the West Bank to further expand its already illegal settlements and occupation there. Now, full attacks on Gaza have begun again, intensifying an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis that Israel has created and the US has enabled.

Divestment has been a key tactic against Israel’s apartheid regime, occupations, and rights abuses. This refers to efforts to spark a movement of institutions ending investments in and contracts with corporations knowingly and persistently involved in Israel’s injustices.

If you do have influence in investment or contract practices for an institution, how can you use that to pressure your organization towards divestment from those cooperating with and benefiting from Israel’s oppression?

Most of us don’t have that, but if you do invest, could you examine where you are invested and therefore profit from? Could it make sense to make changes to avoid these entities?

Check out your investments and find out more here: https://investigate.afsc.org/

Key divestment targets, including Caterpillar, General Electric, Boeing, Rolls Royce, Motorola, Chevron, Palantir, and more: https://afsc.org/divest

Donate

Doctors without Borders has been a key relief entity for Gaza as well as other key areas of conflict around the world.

The below link leads to a rotating list of direct fundraisers for Gazans, curated by Let’s Talk Palestine:

Learning About: Yemen and the Houthi Rebels

Yemen has suddenly been significantly in the news as Democrats try to make the most out of administration official Mike Waltz's inclusion of a journalist on a group chat of administration leaders discussing bombing plans against the Houthis.

As that fills the news, it might be good to ask, are you more concerned about taxpayer-funded bombing of humans in Yemen or about scoring debate points against the "other side" about how incompetent they are? Let's not get confused and think the main thing right now is criticizing officials for not being competent managers of state violence.

With all of this taking place, it’s a good time to learn more about Yemen and the civil war between the government and the Houthis, as well as Houthi attacks on Israeli shipping in support of Gaza and the US strikes in retaliation.

1. Who are the Houthis? A simple guide to the Yemeni group
2. What’s happening in Yemen? A breakdown of the Houthi-US violence

Cat Corner

We need moments of joy to keep us going. Here's what my cat is up to: