Roger Ray, pastor
Thoughts on Independence Day July 7, 2013
Isaiah 10:1-4
Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, 2to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey! 3What will you do on the day of punishment, in the calamity that will come from far away? To whom will you flee for help, and where will you leave your wealth, 4so as not to crouch among the prisoners or fall among the slain? For all this his anger has not turned away; his hand is stretched out still.
An important educational value for those of us who were in public schools during the Cold War was to be thoroughly convinced that we were right and the communists were wrong, evil, bad, dangerous and that they had bad weather, couldn't dance or sing and that they had bad breath. I suppose that it is fortunate for us that students in China were now subjected to the same education during that time since we are not dependent upon that communist economy to keep loaning us enough money to keep our nation afloat...... but I digress.
An important building block in our anti-communist education was the reading of George Orwell's "Animal Farm." As you recall, in Orwell's allegorical tale, the animals on a farm revolt against the farmers and take over, saying that they want to create an egalitarian utopia in which everyone shares equally in both the work and the resources.
Of course, the experiment in self-rule fails. Some animals, especially the cat, managed to scam the system.... Eating but not working. Others, the pigs, claiming superiority, take over control of the farm and eventually evolve into being just as like the farmers. Which says something of the hopelessness of the communist ideal but it doesn't say anything all that great about capitalism and democracy either. The working poor lose in both scenarios.
Still, I find that thinking about role of government in creating a good society is easier when you think about it on a small scale..... Orwell used a single farm, I like to think about an island with a hundred people on it.
If we wanted to create the most fair and just society possible on an island where everyone knows everyone we would divide labor on the island in a way that served the greatest good. We wouldn't all be farmers, we wouldn't all be dentists and we wouldn't all be mayor of the island.
We wouldn't let just one person own all of the housing or all of the farmland. We wouldn't built a mansion for one family and let ten other people remain homeless. That's not to say that the more productive or even the ones who provided a more vital service might not fair a bit better than the rest but the difference would be a matter of degree and not a matter of multiples.... Right?
Assuming that there would be some who were elderly or infirm and some who were dependent children, we would have to support some of our 100 islanders while they cared for children and the ill. Hopefully you would still want to support a pastor but I bet I would need to learn how to make furniture or something equally useful.
If we ask the question, "Does the state have an obligation to take care of the poor?" The answer is a lot easier to see if you are thinking about a state that is comprised of a hundred people in a small space. And in this place we can add a corollary question, "Is there a spiritual obligation to care for the poor," and even parse that between the corporate state responsibility and individual responsibility.
In the current political debate, we often hear conservatives arguing that the Christian value of compassion towards the poor is an individual obligation and not a state obligation. There are not many times when you can say that one religious view is right and the opposite view is wrong but this is one where we can be absolutely clear.
In spite of how often evangelical Christianity uses the word "personal" as in "I have a personal relationship with God" or "I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior," if you take scripture seriously you have to immediately acknowledge that the word "personal" is not in the Bible. It is not in the Hebrew Bible and it is not in the Christian New Testament, nowhere, not once, nada, it is not there.
American emphasis on a "personal" relationship was based on a very poor reading of John Calvin and, it should be noted, John Calvin was not born until quite some time had passed after the writing of both the Old and New Testaments. In Jewish faith, both reward and punishment was primarily seen in the entire nation. Scriptures describe a corporate ethic that was never just personal, it always had to do with the entire community taking care of the poor, the sick, the elderly, widows, orphans, foreigners and all of the most vulnerable members of society.
Modern politicians may not want to do that but they cannot in any honest way point to the traditions of Moses and claim that the government can take a pass on caring for the poor.
The New Testament was composed when Israel did not rule itself. It was an occupied nation and none of the material that forms the Christian part of the Bible was written to a government and yet all through it was a deep community concern that finds expression in the stories from Acts about the new church members selling everything they had to share with those who were in need. Far beyond the leather binding of the New Testament, we have letters and sermons of the early church that are often concerned with managing the appropriate distribution of food and resources.
Sure, it is easier when you think of an island of 100 people than a nation of over 300 million. On that island you would know who really needed help and who was just taking advantage of your compassion. There are always complexities that arise in scale. It is more efficient to have one water system for the city than it would be for all of us to keep a well and a cistern at our homes. It is generally better for school systems, police and fire departments to embrace a fairly large population rather than dividing such things up into islands or neighborhoods of a few dozen but large-scale bureaucracy invites abuse and inefficiency as well.
The real deception that has been fostered by both conservative politicians and right wing evangelicals is that the poor are to blame for the hardships experienced by small business owners and those on the lower end of the economic scale. It is not true. It is true that small businesses and lower income families are struggling now and have been for several years, but the large corporations and right wing politicians have tried to convince them that their suffering is because the government takes their money from them and gives it to the lazy, indifferent and chronically poor.
Those of us who get up and go to work six and seven days a week and do everything we can to be successful while still struggling to get by can feel the injustice in our physical exhaustion, our lack of savings and our dim prospects for retirement. So people are angry, I get that. And people want their religious values to answer the anger but the answer they think they want cannot be found in the pages of the Bible.
Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, recently wrote about this myth of blaming the poor for the hardships of low income families. The real reason, according to Reich, is this radical shift of resources from the lower and middle class into the hands of the super rich. American workers are more productive than ever before but they get to keep a smaller and smaller slice of the wealth that they create.
If wages had kept pace with productivity, middle class families that were earning $50,000 a year twenty years ago would be earning over $90,000 now but the fact of their existence is that their income has grown only a few percentage points while the people at the top of the income ladder are doing so well that you cannot read the Biblical prophets who railed against the wealthy and the ruling class for their oppression of the poor without seeing our wealthy and ruling classes as being the ones to whom these prophets shout their warnings.
We pay lip service to competition and capitalism in the United States but in the socialist democracies in Western Europe, we often see a much more healthy capitalism. In the United States, we have allowed businesses to become monopolies so that things like our monthly cell phone bills are more than three times higher than the same service in France or Spain where in stead of two big cell providers like we have here, they have five or six competing companies.
This past week, Congress failed to pass the farm bill that will gut the SNAP program, what we now call our old "food stamp" program as if our economic challenge in America is that people eat. Interest rates on student loans were doubled, even though at the lower interest rate the Federal government was making billions of dollars of profits.
On our island of 100 people, we would make sure that all of the young people had equal access to education, not just because that is fair or Christian but because the entire island nation is better off with higher levels of education. The same is true for our island of 300 million but we are making phenomenally stupid moves to limit the access of the poor and middle class to higher education, fostering the creation of a permanent aristocracy and a permanent peasant class which will destroy America as we have known it. That's a strong statement and I don't make it lightly.
When a nation makes the decision to deny education to the young, retirement to the elderly, health care to the sick, housing to the homeless and jobs to the unemployed then that is not just a moral failure, it is an economic failure.... It is sacrificing the future for a very brief increase in profits. It is the equivalent of not paying your utility bill in order to save money when, obviously, it is going to end up meaning that your water and electricity service will be turned off in a month or so.
The ethical values expressed in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament are not arbitrary. It is not like there is a God sitting enthroned in the clouds who makes up rules just to see if we will obey them.
The ethics we find in the Bible are there specifically because these values of compassion and mercy promote the health of the whole nation. Anyone, in political office, in the corporate board room or on an island of a hundred citizens who claims that they have a God given right to own so much of the island that other people are in danger of starvation, homelessness or illness is not expressing a Christian value.... They are just greedy jerks looking for a divine right to exploit the weak and it was just those sorts of folks who inspired the Persians to come up with the concept of an eternal lake of fire that the New Testament authors called "hell." And if there is anyone listening who is working on Wall Street or in Washington, D.C., open your office window and take a deep breath..... that just might be brimstone you are smelling.
