Sept. 2, 2012 Labor Day Weekend
Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor
Isaiah 65:17-25
17 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. 18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. 19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. 20 No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. 21 They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. 23 They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord-- and their descendants as well. 24 Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. 25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent--its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.
I was pretty sure that it was a waste of time but at the instance of a member of my team, we all took an evening off from our work among the poor in rural Nicaragua to attend a Rotary Club dinner in Managua. My friend loved his own Rotary Club members in Springfield so much that he was just certain that if this Nicaraguan club only knew what we were doing in the impoverished villages in the jungle that they would want to help.
I watched as he desperately spoke to an indifferent gathering of Nicaraguan first families about how his club in America wanted to work with their club in Managua to raise aid for the poor of their country. You couldn't have cut through their indifference with a chainsaw..... though the thought of trying did occur to me.
The business women and men of Managua do not want to think of their country as being poor. Many of them have never strayed into the countryside of their own nation. The coffee they drink in the morning, the fruit and vegetables on their dinner table is being produced in virtual slave conditions not more than a two hour drive up the Pan American highway from Managua but they will never see it and they don't want to hear about it. They do most of their shopping in Miami, they live in gated communities and the army keeps the Sandinista peasants from ever protesting in the city streets of Managua.
I have seen, on several trips, huge encampments of poor Sandinistas just thirty or forty miles north of Managua. They leave the mountains of Matagalpa and form encampments and every few days they walk a few miles closer to the capital city, threatening invasion. This political posturing happens in other areas as well. I have seen Indians in Ecuador using the same mobile campsite method, moving down out of Otavalo towards Quito.
I was reminded of these threatening encampments last fall when the Occupy Movement was gaining attention. CNN's beautiful business correspondent, Erin Burnett, launched her new show during a time when she had to walk past the protestors on her way to the studio and she express sincere confusion about the whole thing, saying, "What do these people want?"
And even when the issues of income disparity and the use of public money to repay the virtual gambling debts of Wall Street bankers were explained to her, she looked right into the camera and incredulously said that the whole problem is that the protesters don't understand how the economy works.
Of course, Burnett grew up in an affluent family and was engaged to a leading executive at Citigroup..... a recipient of huge bonuses which, I'm sure they believe that they have earned. When the classes grow so far apart that one cannot even see the other one anymore then the low wages and low standard of living of the poor actually makes sense to the rich.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski sat on the set of their popular morning news show talking both about Mika's publication of an entire book about her salary negotiations while sympathizing with Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker's complaints about teacher salaries. Scarborough and Brzezinski have kept their actual salaries largely secret but we know that the hosts of less popular shows make more than ten million dollars a year, including Matt Lauer, Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Meredith Vieira and even Bill O'Reilly.
Brzezinski speaks boldly about the gender gap that separated her salary from the men at the table on Morning Joe but she was still willing to believe that police, firemen and schoolteachers were just going to have to be more realistic about their salary expectations. It is painful to me that so many people are willing to blame middle class laborers for the world's economic challenges while still literally feeling sorry for themselves in the midst of obscene wealth.
Mika Brzezinski threatened to quit because the cost of child care, make up and wardrobe left her with too little of what must have been more than a million dollars a year of salary.
Bill O'Reilly threatened to just retire if Obama allows the tax cut on the super wealthy to sunset because if he has to pay any more in taxes, the more than $8 million dollars a year that he keeps after taxes just wouldn't make it worth it to keep working. And the fact that Bill O'Reilly might actually shut up if his taxes go up is one of the single best arguments for a tax increase I have ever heard.
The premise underlying Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" is that all that had to happen for Scrooge to change his cold heart was to actually see the lives of the poor, the sick, the homeless and hungry. And I want to believe that most people, if they will leave the Rotary Dinner, push back from the makeup counter and actually go and see how a school teacher has to spend their own meager salary to buy supplies for their classroom and to realize that the person who runs into a burning building when everyone else is running out is not either lazy or greedy but is willing to risk their life, spend half a week isolated away from their family for years and years but that they expect to retire with some dignity and have medical care in compensation for their sacrifice.
It doesn't work for everyone. There are people who just have a cold hard place where their heart is supposed to be but I think most people want to be decent folks. But there is a separation between the rich and the poor in our culture. Old neighborhoods had big houses and small houses but, since the automobile has become ubiquitous, we build houses together within a certain price range. Air conditioning has taken away front porches and cable TV pushes everyone back to the back of the house into a family room.
Many neighborhoods don't even have sidewalks. We don't see one another, we don't interact and so is it any wonder that we don't understand, don't sympathize, and don't care? The people who actually own most businesses live nowhere near them.... Or they don't know they own it...... I have no idea what my pension funds are invested in and in most offices, virtually anonymous ownership means that owners never have to know that some of their employees are lined up at Crosslines for an extra bag of groceries to get them through the month.
They don't know which employee comes to work, ignoring the chest pains because they can't afford to see a doctor or miss work even if they need life saving treatment.
In our very familiar scripture lesson today, the prophet is speaking to a people who are leaving slavery behind to go and build a new nation and he says: 21 They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.
The media derision of the Occupy Wall Street movement was that it was lazy bums who wanted a handout. They failed to recognize that what they were asking for was an opportunity to work for a living wage.
The American dream was articulated in a Revolutionary War era saying attributed variously to Washington, Jefferson and Adams that said, "I am a soldier so that my son can be a farmer, so that his son can be a merchant, so that his son can be a poet."
There was, among us, a dream that if you worked hard and tried, that we could change our station in life and that our children could have a better life. But if people who are bankers who move money around from instrument to instrument without ever actually producing anything, and people who are talking heads on TV can make millions of dollars while we insist that the people who pave our roads, grow our food, deliver our mail and teach our children cannot retire, or have access to housing, medical care or education for their children then the American dream is a farce.
How can the richest country in the world even consider creating an economy in which people can work full time and not have a place to live, food, medical care, transportation and a hope of retirement? How could we even be callous enough to discuss it? Especially in a country that is full of churches.
No one should be ashamed to ask for a living wage in exchange for their lifetime of service and our nation should be ashamed that they have to ask. I have no problem with people being economically successful but their success cannot mean that the children of public servants can't go to a state university so that the children of the rich can go to exclusive private colleges. I think people who are clever and talented, inventive and frugal, deserve a bigger piece of the pie but they don't get the whole pie.
And the church that thinks that the "good news" is that the poor get some pie in the sky when they die need to dust off their Bibles are realize that the good news to the poor means that they not only build houses for the rich to live in, they get to build a house and live in it themselves.
They don't just move from one migrant vineyard after another so that the wealthy can have wine on their tables but they get to share in the wine and the roses.
If we have to keep a third of this nation in poverty so that the 1% can live in a way where they never have to see the poor then capitalism and democracy have failed the moral smell test.
Most of the world's great religions began with a leader who became radicalized by the suffering of the poor. Buddha, Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed were all advocates for the poor and each as seen the reform movements they started become the state religion and then the means of the government keeping the poor in submission and in poverty.
None of the world's great religions were royal religions.... They were movements for justice for the poor and that, I insist, is what they should be again.
Several years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich accepted the journalistic challenge of going around the country taking various entry level jobs and trying to survive on the salary. Her book, "Nickle and Dimed" should be a must read for every pastor and church goer in our nation.
While working as a cook in a retirement home in Maine, Ehrenreich has a Saturday evening off and decides to go to a revival being held near her one room apartment. Her observations of the poor who attend such services were prophetic.
She writes, "The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful "amens." It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again to that he can never get a word out of his mouth...... I get up to leave, timing my exit for when the preacher's metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole."
Men and women, I say that it is time to stop crucifying Jesus. It is time to cut him loose from the tent pole. It is time for us to turn the good news for the poor loose in our nation and to stand with laborers and public servants, cooks and janitors, the people wipe the chins and the butts of our nursing home patients, the people wipe the noses of our children and spend long hours with them every day. It is time for us to bring the good news of a living wage to the check out clerk at Walmart and the Taxi driver at the airport.
Do not dream of justice in the next world if you do not have the courage to demand it in this world. There is not enough of heaven to make up for treating the poor to a serving of hell on earth. We must not be silent. We must not stand idly by.
