Confucius "In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of." -
Deuteronomy 8:7-14, 17 7For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, 8a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, 9a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. 10You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.
11 Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. 12When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, 13and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, 14then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,..17Do not say to yourself, 'My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.'
The Lord of the Flies, by British author, William Golding, was a 1950's novel that most of us had to read when we were in middle school. It describes a plane crash on an island in which all of the adults were killed and only a few dozen pre-adolescent boys are left to fend for themselves.
Initially their only goals were to have fun, survive, and keep a signal fire going so that a ship might be enticed to come and rescue them. The novel brilliantly chronicles the emergence of the darker side of human nature even in a fairly plush tropical island, as the boys engage in power struggles, dividing into rival clans and finally killing one of the boys. In the end, the entire island is set ablaze in an attempt to corner and kill another of the island's leaders. The smoke does attract a ship and the boys are confronted by a single adult officer and suddenly, their conscience catches up with them as they realize how feral, how violent, and evil they had become in just a few days of being left unsupervised.
I suppose that our teachers assigned the book to us just as we were coming into adult bodies and being pulled in every passionate direction as we struggled to become adults but it is not as if the story could only be told about pre-pubescent children.
This week we will celebrate our American Thanksgiving holiday that embodies a lot of myths about the awkward beginnings of the British colonies that became the United States of America. The Jamestown colony was a group of several dozen adults who had the opportunity to build a new world settlement in the presence of abundant natural resources but they were nearly wiped out by the individual greed of the colonists who spent time looking for gold rather than planting crops.
Captain John Smith forcefully took control of the colony and gave work assignments to everyone so that their circumstances were improving until Smith had to return to England for medical treatment, and, like a bunch of unsupervised children on an island, the colony fell back into their old habits without Smith there to hold them accountable. There is solid historical evidence that the Jamestown colony actually resorted to cannibalism, not just in digging up freshly buried Indians, but also in killing and eating a teenaged girl in their own colony.
A few years later, the Plymouth colony that was largely founded on religious principles, did not fare much better. The sad commentary on both Jamestown and Plymouth was that when everyone was supposed to work for the common good, most people tried very hard not to work, even when public flogging was employed to discourage sloth.
It was not until they abandoned shared community property and began to work only for their own benefit that most people began to work hard enough to make a living in the new world. This has, of course, encouraged some people to insist that free market capitalism saved America but that is far too simple an explanation for just how dark our human shadow can be, even when our own survival depends upon our willingness to help one another.
The Thanksgiving storyline that taught us that European immigrants came to the colonies for religious freedom and for liberty, democracy, and the free market was more than a little exaggeration. Most immigrants came to escape poverty, the poverty created by an entrenched economic system that forced the many to serve the interests of the wealthy few.
Sadly, The Lord of the Flies, is not just a fictional novel. It described the truth of our very human ability to exploit one another, even when we are trying to escape being exploited ourselves.
The Plymouth community was not unfamiliar with the failings of the Jamestown Colony. The Pilgrims on board the Arbella crossing the Atlantic to found the Plymouth Colony, were not, however, all Pilgrims. The cost of the voyage made it necessary to sell passage to a few people of means who were coming to America to get rich. They did not plan to get rich by the sweat of their own brows but rather, they certainly planned to employ some poor Pilgrims.
Fearing their potential for failure, before they made landfall, their spiritual leader, John Winthrop, delivered a highly idealistic sermon to his captive audience in which he said:
"Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our own wants (superfluities), for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our ... community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."
Economics is a complicated science. Religion gets involved only when the dark shadow of humanity takes charge of the economy so that it becomes abusive. If you look carefully at the dating of the careers of the Old Testament prophets, it becomes clear that there wasn't any notable prophetic preaching when things were going well in ancient Israel. It was only when the majority were being exploited or abused by the powerful and the wealthy that we began to see the bold preaching of the prophets arise.
It is nice when religious leaders and focus on baptizing babies, presiding over weddings, funerals, and holiday festivals with poetic liturgy and nostalgic carols and hymns. But when people are going hungry, homeless, and uneducated... when the poor are being left to suffer with their illnesses or being forced to bear the weight of the labor that benefits the rich, then people with a sincere spirituality cannot be idol, indifferent or devoted to Bible Study and Christmas caroling.
John Winthrop's fears came true. Their attempt at communal living failed but their survival strategy, an "every man for himself" capitalist economy has not proven to be salvific either. Somewhere between the extremes of communal property and economic survival of the fittest there is a just society and we can never be blindly patriotic until we have found that right balance.
We began today with this wonderful Confucian quote about poverty and wealth. We think of Confucius as either a philosopher or a spiritual leader but he drew his paycheck for being a low level government official. He thought about government a lot, about how a government can succeed or fail in supporting the creation of a just, harmonious, and he would even say, a courteous society.
He says that in a country that has a good government, that is being well managed, there mere existence of poverty should be embarrassing because, if you still have poor people when you have an efficient government then that can only mean that the people in power just don't care about that plight of the poor and that should be humiliating to them.
Confucius tended to teach in parallel couplets and the mirror image of this first statement is the observation that in a country that is poorly managed, that has an ineffective government, wealth should be a source of shame.
We can look to our southern neighbors to see examples of that.....the government of Nicaragua is one of the most ineffective that I have had the chance to see up close... in a nation of 4.5 million people, there are five fabulously wealthy families and nearly 2 million people living at the point of malnutrition. Wealth, in a poorly run country is almost always gained at the enslavement of the powerless. We have monkeys in our local zoo who are better housed and fed and who, frankly, have greater personal freedom, than do the Nicaraguans who work on most of the coffee plantations.
The people in our country who think that they would like to have a Libertarian led government have no idea what a nation governed by the survival of the fittest really looks like. It looks like a nation without roads, bridges, schools or hospitals, with millions suffering in abject poverty while a few demonic super rich families try to imagine new ways of enjoying their wealth.
Still, the Thanksgiving myths that inspired the first Thanksgiving and the school plays we are endured as children should not be set lightly aside. We have a strong and comparatively efficient government.... And if you don't believe that they are, try not filing an income tax return for a year or two, but it is a strong and efficient government that often fails to have a moral rudder.
Winthrop and many early leaders of utopian religious communities simply gave human beings more credit than we deserve. The "dark side of the force is strong with us." In our minds, we can see, we can do the calculations and we can see that we have come into, as Moses said, a land flowing with milk and honey.
We have the resources in the United States to wipe out poverty, to care for the sick, to educate the next generation and to employ the poor at a living wage. All we have to do is marry our minds to our hearts, to let our idealism, our patriotism, our spirituality, become sufficiently influential to keep our shadow at bay.
There will be no more poverty in America when we will no longer tolerate it. There will be no more discrimination against minorities, no denial of rights to gay people, and no splitting of families because of which side of the river they were born on, when we will no longer be willing to be a part of a nation that is well governed but still possessing a second class of peasant citizens.
Winthrop was idealistic but he was not wrong.... We must make the conditions of others our own, having always our community before our eyes, until everyone has reason to be thankful for the circumstances of their lives.
So, in conclusion, let me tell you a little bit about the word "amen." We say it sometimes just to indicate that we are at the end of a prayer or hymn, or we shout it as a sign of agreement with a statement or a speech. Technically, it means "truly," or "so be it." Where our gospels translate Jesus as saying, "Truly, truly, I tell you..." the text literally says, "amen, amen, I tell you...."
There is, in saying it in a religious context, both a sense of affirmation and a bit of a prayer of intercession.... A hope, a wish, that what has been said will become true. And so, as we prepare for our nation's observance of Thanksgiving, I hope that we will rekindle a dream of a nation so great that we don't have to be ashamed of our mistreatment of the poor, our neglect of the aging and the ill, our oppression of minorities, but that we may, in fact, become that nation that is a city built on a hill as a shining example of a place of opportunity, freedom, liberty, and of real social justice. To that, I hope, we can all say, "amen."
