Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Labor Day Sept. 1, 2013
Leviticus 19:13 13You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning.
Deuteronomy 24:14-15 14You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land in one of your towns. 15You shall pay them their wages daily before sunset, because they are poor and their livelihood depends on them; otherwise they might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt.
Isaiah 58:3b-7 Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. 4Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. 5Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? 6Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 7Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Jeremiah 22:13
13Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; who makes his neighbors work for nothing, and does not give them their wages;
The great Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, said, "There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true."
You might say that religion is especially adept at getting people to believe what isn't true.... Priests and pastors pepper their sermons with references to things may well be matters of pure ancient imagination for which there is not a scrap of evidence. We can only hope that this ancient snake oil practice is finally on its way out, to be replaced with an evidence based approach to faith.
But if religion has taught people to believe in what is not true, you have to still take you hat off to politicians who have constantly managed to accomplish the more difficult task of persuading people to refuse to believe what is true.
Politicians are masters of double speak, holding firmly to the great American philosopher, Mark Twain, who said that "A lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth."
As television coverage of armed conflicts became common, the military started changing the nomenclature of their weapons. A battlefield missile used only in warfare is no longer called "hell bender" or "widow maker" but is named "the Patriot" as if high tech warfare is patriotic. Or more ironically, "the Peace Keeper" which is the exact opposite of what it does. Or a "Smart Bomb" euphemistically given to a device that misses its indented target twice as often as it hits what it was aimed at.
And parents who are both frightened for their children and proud of their service will plaster their cars with signs that say that "My son is fighting for your freedom," without ever stopping to wonder how any military action we're engaged in has anything to do with protecting our freedom..... we have deployed occupation forces.... We're busy taking freedom away from people... not protecting freedom. That is, in no way, to diminish the honor of being willing to serve your country and to place yourself in the way of mortal risk in military service but even people in uniform need to avoid the deceptive language of politicians who are forever white washing tombs.
There are two ways to be fooled.... One is to believe what is not true and the other is to refuse to believe what is true. Our federal government has shown no shame when it is discovered, after the fact, that the given reasons for going to war in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq and Afghanistan were lies.
We are about to launch strikes on Syria allegedly because we just cannot allow a state to use chemical weapons of war though nothing at all was said about this when Israel used chemical weapons in 2008. Chemical weapons are heinous, immoral, horrible..... and so are explosive bombs and bullets. We just need to wake up and get oriented to reality.
When those white, male, slave owners met in Philadelphia to write our constitution, they reached for ideals that they had not yet seen or even personally embodied. They said: We the people of the United States, in order to form a classed society just like we left in Europe, to oppress minorities, keep the poor politically disenfranchised, create international hostilities that promote the wealth of our aristocracy, and to insure the success of our corporations and banks, do ordain and establish this Constitution.
Well, that's not what they actually said.... But it is starting to look like that is our functioning constitution. What the preamble to our constitution actually says is:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
A government exists to make it possible for people to live together with as little crime as possible, within secure borders, and to promote the general welfare!
It has taken me too long to get to it, but here is the lie that I came here to talk about today. Our government has been jumping through every deregulation and tax loop hole hoop to advantage the economic top two percent of this nation under the rubric of benefiting "job creators."
The lie that this unholy union between corporations and government keeps repeating until they get their brain dead zombie army, otherwise known as the Tea Party, to repeat it is that we have to rig the economic system to benefit the super rich so that they will create more jobs.
Consider that sweet deep fried treat you enjoy with your coffee here every Sunday morning..... yes, I'm talking about donut holes. These are not just any donut holes..... this is our approximation of a sacramental meal..... these are St. George's donut holes that give common church members the strength to go out and fight dragons.... If there were such things as dragons we sure are ready to fight them aren't we?
Now, what would make St George's hire more donut makers? Would a tax cut make them hire more people? No, not if they had enough employees to make all of the donuts they can sell. So what makes a donut shop hire more donut makers? Demand. Economics doesn't get any more simple than this.
If they start selling out early in the day and they see that they can make more money by making more donuts, then they will hire to meet demand.
In a capitalist economy, who are the job creators? Consumers. Consumers create demand and therefore create jobs.
If there is a job shortage in America it is not because the rich are not rich enough it is because the consumers don't have enough money to buy any more stuff. And when demand gets tight, the super rich will invest their money in foreign nations or shift their production out of America to cheaper labor sources abroad.
Impoverishing the working class is what makes us lose jobs. If you give someone who makes $10 million dollar a year a $1 million dollar bonus, that will not affect the number of donuts that they buy, or whether their kids get new shoes that fit their growing feet or if they get to send their kids to college.
This weekend, fast food workers are striking all across our nation, asking for a living wage. We have often been sold the myth that minimum wage workers are all just high school students who work a few hours a week for spending money. And a lot of us did exactly that when we were students.
The truth is that nearly 90% of minimum wage earners are over 20 years old. The majority are women. Nearly half of them are over 40 years old and one in every four of them are raising young children in poverty.
The Walmarts and the McDonalds of this nation employee people so far below what it takes for them to live that their employees have to seek public assistance in food stamps, Medicaid and public housing, in which case, their products are not really as cheap as we are made to believe.
These corporations shift their moral payroll obligations onto government agencies and charities when the simple, obvious, moral answer is to pay everyone who works a salary that allows them to live. Any American who works a full-time job and cannot have housing, utilities, health care, food and transportation is a victim of something that can easily be seen as being more immoral than slavery because even slave owners had to feed, house and care for their slaves.
The legislatures in Texas and North Carolina are trying to disenfranchise poor voters. The governor in Wisconsin tried to break the back of the state's labor unions and now we're doing much the same in Missouri, laying off the employees who serve the poor both to make it harder for poor people to access food stamps and public assistance and to cut the state's budget without having to tax the rich.
Conservatives don't like the Affordable Healthcare Act and have pretended to try to repeal it 40 times in Congressional votes. But in truth they would not touch it. I don't like the Affordable Healthcare Act because it is legislation written by the insurance industry for the profit of the insurance industry.
We could cut our health care costs by more than a third while giving every American health care if only we instituted a universal health care system just like the one we set up in Iraq when we took over their country? Why did we do it there? Because it is the most logical and economical way to provide health care, DUH!
But we're told that the government can't manage health care when, in fact, the government already provides more than half of the health care in America and they do it for less than 1/4 of the overhead charged by insurance companies. Everyone in Congress knows this is true but they don't want for you to believe what is true..... and yet Detroit is turning into a ghost town, in part because every American made car carries with it a huge burden of health care provided to retired workers.
Universal health care would dramatically lower the cost of American made products, bringing hundreds of thousands of jobs back to America.... Good paying, union jobs, but the Insurance industries and their congressional lap dogs won't let us do what every other industrialized nation in the world has already done.
I don't know why Americans are so eager to believe what is not true and to refuse to believe what is true. I don't know why every other western nation was able to end slavery without a civil war but we had to kill off a huge percentage of our own kin to end slavery here.
I don't know why Americans who ostensibly rebelled against the classed society of Europe to create a truly free nation where everyone was equal, will now bow down to the super rich while showing contempt for the people who cook our food, build our homes, repair our cars, pave our roads, who bring us electricity, gas and water, who teach our children, who care for our grandparents, who fight our fires and protect our streets.
Why do we so willingly cast blame on the pension funds of teachers and fire fighters for our budget woes..... do you think that those people got rich off of the salaries we paid them while they were working? Don't you know that they get a pension specifically because they served the public interests at low salaries, some risking their lives for the common good?
What you are hearing me say today is why so many people in corporate and political leadership keep saying that they don't want religion in politics. And I am sure that the business and government leaders in the days of Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, Hosea and Jesus didn't want them commenting on their abuse of workers either but I have already decided whose side I'm on and they have no way of buying me off.
You don't hear many unvarnished speeches about the abuse of workers. Preachers can do it because we are not usually running for elected office, we do not sell a product to the government and we have no tax interests to protect. And if you are not aware that the government grant money given to faith based organizations in this century is just an attempt at silencing the churches that do advocate for the poor then let me shine a little light on that situation for you.
No church gets those grants renewed if they are publicly saying the things you have heard me say today..... it is hush money and you won't see us take any of it.... Ever. I implore you, as a people who have taken compassion to be a core value, people who are committed to justice and to mercy, to recognize that being a patriotic American means to work for the common good.
The church and the state can work hand in hand as long as the state is not trying to lie to, exploit, oppress and then recruit Americans to go and die needlessly in foreign wars. We can work together for the common good.
So, show me a government that wants to make sure that every American child gets a good education in a safe neighborhood, and has access to health care and higher education.... Show me a government that will establish a living wage as the minimum wage, and supports a decent, respectful and honorable retirement for all working people. Show me a government that is respectful of the alien and an advocate for the poor, that guarantees life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone in both equality and freedom and I guarantee you, when I see that government, you sill see me become the most ardent patriot that has ever lived..... but until I see that government, then I'm going to keep preaching.
