Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
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.
It is not my goal to be partisan. When we first started this church, just three months before the history making 2008 election, we actually had several of the leaders of the Greene Co. Democratic Party in our church. I celebrated the election of our nation's first black president with as much enthusiasm as anyone else at the watch party. I was a huge fan of our Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill.
Prior to that time I had been regularly contacted by officials in the Democratic Party trying to recruit me to run for various elected offices because, for a generation, I had been writing opinion columns in the Springfield News-Leader that took our elected officials to task for illegal wars, cuts to education and poverty programs, environmental degradation, and for misogynistic and homophobic policies.
However, when we had prominent Democrats in the White House and the Senate and I was critical of them for illegal wars, undermining education and poverty programs, failing to defend the environment, and for tacitly supporting misogynistic and homophobic policies, I stopped hearing from the local and state Democratic Party. Many of those Democratic loyalist members of the church left and left so angry that I can sometimes clear out several tables in the coffee shops where liberals hang out just by walking in the room.
Missouri's favorite son, President Harry Truman, was often called "Give-em Hell Harry" but Truman objected, saying, "I never really gave em hell, I just told the truth and they thought it was hell."
But what I find the most interesting and simultaneously the most disappointing is how the issues that Harry Truman was so adamant about nearly 70 years ago as he ran for re-election are so very current as to make one despair about our ability to make progress.
This is a longer quote than I typically use in the pulpit but indulge me for a moment to share a piece of one of Truman's campaign speeches and where he uses the words "Republican Party" try to translate that as "elected officials" because there is not much of merit on either side of the political fence. He said:
Well, I have been studying the Republican Party (let's just say "politicians") for over 12 years at close hand in the Capital of the United States. And by this time, I have discovered where the Republicans stand on most of the major issues.Since they won't tell you themselves, I am going to tell you.They approve of the American farmer-but they are willing to help him go broke.They stand four-square for the American home--but not for housing.They are strong for labor--but they are stronger for restricting labor's rights.They favor a minimum wage--the smaller the minimum the better.They indorse educational opportunity for all--but they won't spend money for teachers or for schools.They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine--for people who can afford them.They approve of social security benefits-so much so that they took them away from almost a million people.They believe in international trade--so much so that they crippled our reciprocal trade program, and killed our International Wheat Agreement.They favor the admission of displaced persons--but only within shameful racial and religious limitations.They consider electric power a great blessing-but only when the private power companies get their rake-off.They say TVA is wonderful--but we ought never to try it again.They condemn "cruelly high prices"--but fight to the death every effort to bring them down.They think the American standard of living is a fine thing--so long as it doesn't spread to all the people.And they admire the Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it.If the president of the United States could state the hypocritical nature of the economic divide so clearly, and he could state it in a democracy where the masses who are the victims of this economic inequality can vote, how is it that nothing seems to have changed?
John Maynard Keynes succinctly describes the problem this way, he said: Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
It is difficult to motivate productive work, innovation, invention, or denial of any immediate personal fulfillment in the absence of a promise of some personal reward. Capitalism holds out the promise that if you will work hard, delay gratification, and save that you will reap a wonderful reward of economic security if not wealth, and comfort if not luxury.
The problem is that when the American Dream becomes American Wishful Thinking, when hard work, delaying gratification, and saving doesn't allow you to retire with dignity, have access to health care or to ever own a home, then the promise of capitalism becomes a lie. With the right rules in place, capitalism and its rewards inspired invention, innovation, hard work and it produced the strongest middle class in the history of the world.
But when we vilify teachers and police and auto-workers, all labor unions, for insisting on a living wage and a pension that let's a person buy Bermuda shorts, black knee socks and sandals that they can wear around the retirement home in Florida where they can criticize the government full-time, then capitalism is no longer a gift, it is a lie and a curse.
The late Jewish Croatian economist, Branko Horvat stated: ... it is now well known that capitalist development leads to the concentration of capital, employment and power. It is somewhat less known that it leads to the almost complete destruction of economic freedom.
Everyone who has ever played the old board game, Monopoly, has a basic understanding of unbridled capitalism. If you keep rolling the dice and moving through life in a capitalist system, eventually one person ends up with all of the land and money and everyone else is out of the game.
You can change the rules so that all of the players have a chance to get back into the game, rules that keep one player from quickly acquiring all of the land, utilities and infrastructure. In truth, our nation has been up and down that rollercoaster a few times in our 240 year history.
In our earliest days, Thomas Jefferson, one of the primary architects of the nation, said "I hope we shall crush ... in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country".
The most wicked of men will not, of their own accord do what is right for the poor, the laborers. It was not natural market forces that brought slavery to an end. It was not the invisible hand of the market that ended child labor. It was not the competition of the marketplace that made the workplaces more safe, that gave us the modern invention of the weekend, the 40 hour work week, paid vacations or sick leave.
It was organized labor working in conjunction with spiritual leaders and visionary politicians. When things go a little too well for a little too long, the unions become weak, the church becomes irrelevant and politicians are sold to the highest bidder.
Franklin Roosevelt, who had to rally America to respond to Facism, Nazism, Communism, and nationalism, also found the time and energy to warn the Congress of the United States that their constant caving into corporate power threatened to bring America as a free nation to an end. He said, on April 29, 1938:
[T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
I am currently perplexed by the involvement of someone who has seemed to be an advocate for a more fair tax system, Warren Buffett, in the proposed move of Burger King's headquarters to Canada to avoid paying corporate taxes in the USA. The media in concert with corporations has given this process the benign sounding name of "inversion." Inversion sounds much nicer than bank robbery doesn't it?
For there to be a functioning democracy where people can buy Whoppers and fries, there have to be paved roads, water and electric lines, police and firemen, schools, hospitals, and airports. Corporations love to harvest in the fertile fields of the American economy but they don't want to pay their fair share of the taxes that plow the fields and plant.
When Walgreens wanted to jump through the tax loophole called "inversion" an angry public pointed out that the majority of their income derives directly from government supported prescription payments.
They realized that their lack of patriotism was going to cost them a lot of customers and even though they backed down and stayed here, the fact that they wanted to take their money to Ireland has made me drive past Walgreens several times and I'm not seeing that trend changing anytime soon.
For all of the screaming corporations do about American taxes, the larger companies have already influenced the writing of tax codes to get their effective rate down to nearly 0%. You don't think that the lobbyists for Burger King hamburger and French fry cooks wrote those tax codes do you?
One of our long time listeners is an American ex-pat living in Scotland. Robyn recently wrote to ask me who it was that always yells "amen" at the end of my sermons. She went so far as to say that sometimes my sermons make her feel depressed but she always hangs on to hear Rev. Mel shout "amen" because that always makes her feel good.
I never get tired of telling people about my friend, Rev. Mel Miller who has spent his life fighting for social and economic justice, fighting against racism, warfare and prejudice. But I told her, Mel is 90 now and not getting around as well as he used to. And she opined, that it was going to be horrible to lose that voice when he is gone.
I thought about it for a moment and tried to imagine what church will be like when Mel isn't able to be here and I just felt, I felt it deep inside, that the first day Mel can't come that probably everyone left here would yell amen in his honor.
Mel has spent a lot of his life as a lone voice calling for school integration, housing for the poor, justice for American Indians, and support for poor farmers. I've felt pretty isolated here in southern Missouri, performing weddings for same sex couples, fighting corporations, hospitals and churches that abuse the vulnerable.
But if it is just me bloviating about progressive religion and Mel shouting Amen then we are a pretty silly pair of preachers. Corporations have as their mission statement that they are going to pay a dividend to their shareholders. Politicians have as their unstated mission to be re-elected by any means necessary.
What stands between the corporations and the government and all of the people who have no voice, who are too poor to have a lobbyist or to have politicians come courting their donations? You and me. Just you and just me.
We are the prophets now. We are Isaiah, Moses, Jeremiah, and Amos. We are the ones who will demand that workers be given a living wage. We are the ones that will insist that laborers who build houses get to live in one that they own. We are the ones who will defend the immigrant farmer, the child growing up in urban blight in underfunded schools.
We are the ones who will prevent our economically disadvantaged young men and women from being recruited to go die in a war for oil and military spending.
How can we defend justice against the combined power of corporations and government. Ah, my friends, you defend justice the same way you defend a lion..... you let it out of the cage. You talk about it, you don't give up, you shout amen until you are hoarse.
Old king Pharaoh, "let my people go." And Burger King, if you don't love the poor people who eat your crummy food enough to help pay for their schools, health care, and housing then you can go but you won't be taking my dollars with you.
Walgreens, you want to give advice to seniors about which Medicare prescription benefit to choose? Alright, but I will advise those seniors to take their prescriptions to locally owned pharmacies who are not trying to rob this nation of its future.
It is not teacher and police pensions that are threatening this nation's economy. There are no teachers with off shore accounts and apartments in Paris. Business owners may cry out against the minimum wage being raised so something slightly better than slavery but look, if everybody went to an Ivy League college and got a Phd somebody would still have to nail shingles to roofs, make pizzas and milk cows..... at some point we have to acknowledge that the people who make like possible are people who deserve to have their lives made possible.
What I know for sure is that the corporations and the government will never get this right until you tell them and tell them often enough and loudly enough that they can't pretend that they don't hear you.
Well, I guess that's what I've got to say. Now, what do you have to say?
