Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 20 Sept. 22, 2013
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
18 My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.
19 Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land:
'Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not in her?'
('Why have they provoked me to anger with their images,
with their foreign idols?')
20 'The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.'
21 For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt,
I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.
22 Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?
O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!
Just before we learned that the United States Congress voted to cut $40 billion dollars out of the nation's food stamp program, the Executive Editor of our Springfield News-Leader, David Stoeffler, announced that he was taking part in the "SNAP Challenge," attempting to eat only what he could eat if he were living on Food Stamps which works out to be about $4.50 a day. I look forward to getting updates on David's experience though, as courageous as it is to do this, it is still not exactly the same as sharing in the plight of the poor in most cases.
If I had to live on $4.50 a day of food, then I would get very serious about vegetable gardening in the backyard of my home, something the poor cannot typically do. I would also get serious about canning and freezing, buying food in bulk, and working to balance my diet by using a lot of dried beans and grain..... because I have a fully equipped kitchen, storage space and access to the right know-how to do it..... also not typically the case for the hungry poor.
Still, in my case, there would be other complications..... I'm on a pretty rigorous diet and I'm trying to eat locally produced farm goods both for my own health and to support local farmers. But if you take $4.50 down to any of our local Farmers Markets, you are not going to get much to eat.
In fact, by and large, the most affordable foods at the grocery store are the ones that are making us obese. There is a huge upsurge in diabetes and other obesity related illnesses among the poor because of the kinds of foods that we give away at food pantries and that we make available in large quantities at low prices.
It is not just about hunger, or having to deny your kids the kinds of restaurant or highly advertised foods that their friends eat. And it isn't about having to just not go to the coffee shop with coworkers and friends for a $4 cup of coffee the way most of us do, it is about relegating the poor to a diet that shortens their lives and makes them sick.
All the while, the members of Congress who voted to cut 30 million people off from getting any food assistance at all, treat themselves to free meals at the most expensive restaurants in Europe and Asia at tax payer expense while traveling on tax payer provided junkets. Yes, it is hypocritical and, yes, it makes me angry and it should make us all angry but the disconnect is as common as dirt.
Most of us here in the Midwest rarely have to spend an hour on a crowded subway train where the homeless hide out to avoid the weather. We don't commute on crowded city buses, on the look out for pick pockets while avoiding eye contact with the pan handlers. Even those of us who regularly serve food in our homeless shelters where we know the names of many of the chronically poor, we don't know where they live, or camp, or park the car they sleep in at night.
Even when you try, you don't get to share in the experience of the poor but our faith requires of us that try to feel with them. That is what real compassion is.... That is empathy.... To allow ourselves to let down our defenses and to have the courage to identify with someone who is in a really bad place in life..... even if they got there due to their own bad choices.
Our scripture lesson today is an excellent example of a compassionate lament from the 8th chapter of Jeremiah. He is weeping because he sees the field workers at the end of the fall harvest and they are still hungry.... When the store houses and granaries are full. It was at the time of year when there was plenty of food and still there were people going hungry and the gross injustice of this was physically painful to Jeremiah and that ability to empathize, to feel it in our own gut is what is missing in our Congress and often in our churches.
There is this attitude of wanting to shame and punish the poor for being poor. Barbara Ehrenreich, who became famous for her book about her experiences of trying to live on the minimum wage, Nickled and Dimed, has recently been speaking about the ways in which we are literally taxing the poor for being poor.
Ten million people are charged with misdemeanors every year and the fines and jail time associated with these, while an inconvenience to many are insurmountable to the struggling poor. And many of those misdemeanor charges are for things like your teenager's truancy from school.... And they may have simply been late because the city bus they take to school was late. Some are even made to pay for the cost of their incarceration when they are put in jail.
Many have to go to jail because they can't pay a fine and then they lose their job because they were in jail. And then they cannot get another job because they have a criminal record. All of which starts to add up to a situation that sounds like it comes right out of a Charles Dickens novel from two hundred years ago.
We live in a place where the estimated living wage.... What it takes for basic survival, is about $17 an hour and the minimum wage is just over $7 an hour and so we put a huge portion of our society into an absolutely no-win situation and then we tell them not to drink, use drugs, steal or commit petty crimes or we'll take a few hundred dollars from them.
Then when I bring up the subject of raising the minimum wage the immediate response from readers is that raising the minimum wage will hurt the economy and I always want to shout back, "Whose economy will it hurt?" Because if you are trying to live on the minimum wage, your economy can't get much worse.
But among those who have vociferously argued for cutting money out of the SNAP program are several members of Congress who own land in their home districts who receive generous farm subsidies out of the tax payers coffers. Stephen Fincher of Tennessee who voted to cut the SNAP program to the bone has received $3.5 million dollars of tax payer agricultural subsidies in the last eight years.
I understand subsidies that keep family farms in operation to feed the nation.... I don't understand making someone a millionaire because they happen to have land while taking food away from the next generation of citizens because, we tell ourselves, they don't deserve it.
I would like to tell Stephen Fisher what I think that he deserves but my comments are currently being recorded.
We give $4 billion a year in subsidies to oil companies at a time when they are making record profits. We spend hundreds of billions to maintain dozens of foreign military bases whose sole purpose was the prosecution of WW II which has been over for 70 years now but we cannot afford to allow our children and our citizens to eat?
You know, I don't believe that there is such a thing as hell but I entirely understand why the Zoroastrians came up with the concept. There isn't one, but sometimes it seems like there ought to be one!
Robert Reich just released a new documentary this week which none of us here will get to see because no theater in the Ozarks is going to show it but those of you who don't live here in this MENSA Club bastion should try to get out and see "Inequality for All." Reich points out how the growing income disparity in our nation has now reach a point it has only seen once before in our history..... just before the world economy fell into the great depression.
It is no exaggeration to say that if we cannot recover a sense of decency, fairness, compassion, empathy in this nation that we not only are headed for an unparalleled economic collapse but, if you take Jeremiah seriously, if we don't change our course, we deserve to have an entire social collapse.
The day may come when there will be no more churches in our country. The public increasingly finds no need for church and the academy increasingly believes that we do more harm than good.
And so, the prophetic voice of faith may one day be silenced.... But this is not that day. As long as there is breath in us, we must take up the cry of the needy. We must speak in the halls of government where the poor are not often heard. We will continue to take healthy food to the hungry every week but we must also work to make it possible for them to get a decent job with a living wage so that one day they will no longer need us to show up at the homeless shelters.
There may not be a place of eternal burning torment but that doesn't mean that we can't give the people who persecute the poor enough hell to make em change their ways.
