“The Ghost Community (the
one everyone talks about, but no one has ever seen)”
April 8, 2018 Dr.
Roger Ray click here to see the video
Acts 4:32-35 Now the whole group of
those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private
ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in
common. 33With great power the apostles gave their testimony to
the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. 34There
was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold
them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. 35They laid it
at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.
The Brazilian archbishop, Dom Hélder Câmara, is famous for having said, “When
I feed the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.” It is true
enough that governments and corporations love to see charities filling the gaps
of the social safety net but they never like it when charities start to demand
that the society become more fair.
A
moral pillar for Christians, Jews, and Muslims is charity. Giving to the poor
is an inherent dimension of any sincere spirituality. Most of you will remember
the Moral Majority’s attack on government social services in the 1980’s when
Ronald Reagan was insisting that the government get out of the business of
caring for the poor to allow churches to do what churches have always done,
which, he assumed, was to dole out charity.
Of
course, Ronald Reagan didn’t attend church nor did he financially donate more
than a pittance to charity but that is the conservative mindset. My money is my
money but you tree-hugging do-gooders out there need some place to put your
money so why don’t you form the social safety net to protect people who are
being impoverished by the marketplace.
Who am I to correct
Archbishop Camara, but I would restate his famous quote slightly differently
because the real question is not so much, “why are the poor hungry.” They real
question is why are there so many poor people? Poverty, in the presence of
abundance, is inexcusable. The only reason why we still have poor people in the
world is because our economic system allows a tiny fraction of people to hoard
the majority of the resources.
You have heard the saying
that possession is 9/10 of the law but
that should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows who writes the laws.
There are lobbyists for the corporations that make military hardware, for pharmaceutical
companies, for oil and gas companies, but there are no lobbyists for the
minimum wage workers at McDonalds, or for the aids caring for our aging
relatives in nursing homes.
In
fact, no one less than the Harvard economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, said: "The
modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral
philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for
selfishness." The obvious irony is that there is no moral justification
for the levels of greed that exist in our society when there is no real reason
for poverty except for the fact that the rich control the government and the
police.
Ever since the ancient Phoenicians
invented money, we have had a way of distributing wealth but the way that we
have inherited in our day, and mind you, our economic system is always evolving
… economics today is not what it was even 50 years ago… our present system is
dramatically skewed towards giving more and more to the wealthy and less and
less to those who produce wealth.
It has been broadly
reported that: The three richest
Americans have the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the U.S.
population. And 82% of the global wealth generated last year went to just 1% of
the world's population.
There is no plausible
defense for that kind of distribution of wealth. It is a moral crisis!
Taxation is a form of
redistribution of wealth. The super wealthy could have their own water and
power sources, in fact, until a century ago, they did. Taxes build roads,
bridges, water systems, schools, and municipal services of police, fire departments,
highway maintenance, and medical services.
But cutting taxes is
always a popular political idea and it is sold to the poor as if 
that was going to somehow help them. The truth
is, as in our recent major tax cut, the cuts put more money in the hands of the
already rich and it took services away from the poor and middle class.
that was going to somehow help them. The truth
is, as in our recent major tax cut, the cuts put more money in the hands of the
already rich and it took services away from the poor and middle class.
My own income is on the
lower side of middle class incomes and the Trump tax cut will result in a $1000
increase in my Federal Taxes and cuts to Affordable Healthcare subsidies have
added between $2000 and $3000 to my premiums.
So the much heralded
middle class tax cut cost me $3000 or $4000 and if it hit me that hard then it
must have hit most others in my income level about the same way.
The
greatest American advocate for the poor in the 20th century had to
be Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement. A reporter caught
her in an unguarded moment when she expressed herself rather succinctly: Our problems stem from our acceptance of
this filthy, rotten system.
Red
states where very conservative governors have locked arms with right wing
legislatures to cut taxes and therefore reduce government spending are now
reaping the whirlwind. Teacher strikes recently broke out in West Virginia and
their courage helped teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky to find the will to
unite and strike for higher wages, smaller classrooms, and better funding for
equipment and supplies. 
It
has now been more than 20 years since Thomas Frank published this excellent
book, What’s the Matter with Kansas, describing in detail how states that were
formerly quite progressive were, over a century, seduced into consistently
voting against their own interests. It is almost amazing to see how stakes like
Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, which are
largely populated with lower income people, can be duped into voting the cut
taxes on the wealthy and thereby, cut their own throats by having their
necessary services taken from them.
In Oklahoma, the teachers
went on strike only when the state, unwilling to pay them more, cut the school
week down to 4 days, sacrificing their own children’s education to keep taxes
lower. I don’t want to throw shade on Oklahoma this morning, but I have had
reason to be in Oklahoma quite a bit over the past few years and I don’t see
any problems there that less education would help…. If you catch my drift.
But
for some reason, the poor and the middle class just keep going along with
totally absurd tax structures until things get to these absolutely desperate
circumstances.
A few years ago the
French economist, Thomas Piketty, published this book, Capital in the Twenty-First
Century. It was on the New York Times best seller list because it is a terribly
important book but it set records for being one of the most often purchased and
least often read because it is about a million pages long and impossibly dull
to read.
I read enough to
summarize it for you this way: First,
you must understand that there is a huge difference between income and capital.
Income is what we worry about the most in terms of a minimum wage or a living
wage or even a guaranteed basic income but Piketty wants us to think in terms
of capital, what you own. The equity in your home, the value of your stocks,
savings, and pension funds, or any land you may own, that is capital.
The second thing to know
about Piketty’s book is that he says that way too few people own way too much
of the capital in the world and if we don’t redistribute it we’ll never defeat
poverty by just tinkering around with income. He also acknowledges that even
though the future of civilization depends upon a redistribution of capital that
probably no nation will actually do it. Rick people put up a lot of resistance
to this idea.
I’m
going back to England for a speaking tour in a couple of weeks. I have not been
there for three years now so some of the churches where I spoke last time
appear to have forgotten my last visit enough to have me back. But when I went
in 2015, I asked one of my hosts to suggest a book that I could read that would
help me to understand the thinking of my audience in the U.K. I was surprised
when he suggested this book, Russell Brand’s Revolution.
I didn’t initially think
that he was serious… after all, Brand is better known for his drug use and ribald
humor than for any real social conscience but I was surprised that Brand has
tried to not only sober up but to take a more spiritually aware view of the
world.
Brand is a lot easier to
read than Piketty, but he is, surprisingly enough, coming to many of the same
conclusions. The world’s wealth is held in way too few hands and there
absolutely must be a radical redistribution of wealth. He also agrees with Piketty
in the assumption that no nation will actually do it, but Brand doesn’t stop
there. He literally encourages his readers not to bother voting because voting
just perpetuates the myth that the poor have a voice in how they are governed.
Brand says that what has to happen in the United States, and the United
Kingdom, and other western democracies is just what the title of his book says:
there has to be a revolution.
Of
course, Brand has never lived through a revolution and neither have we and I
strongly suspect that we wouldn’t like it very much. The process is a rather
bloody one. But if our politicians maintain this “let them eat cake” attitude
about the poor and taxes, it may, in fact, come to that. As President John Kennedy said, “Those who
make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”
We began today with a
passage of New Testament scripture and though you may think that I have
forgotten all about it, I actually titled this sermon on that passage from the
second chapter of Acts. Luke writes the first half of Acts as early church
propaganda more than it was ecclesial history but suffice it to say, Luke was
not there to witness the accounts he is attempting to describe.
I titled this sermon the “ghost
community” because Luke is describing a community that everyone has dreamed of,
but no one has ever seen, or if they did, it didn’t last long enough to sit for
a portrait. The evangelist says that the early church was so united, so moved
by compassion and love for one another, that they sold all that they owned and
turned it over to the apostles and that these church leaders would then
distribute resources to those who were in need.
I cannot emphasize enough
that this is not a historical account, it is a religious narrative that is trying
to say that the early church lived in a very utopian way, but I doubt that Luke
based this narrative on anything more than imagination. However, there have
been very serious attempts at creating utopian societies. Several were here in
the United States in the 19th century when there seemed to be a lot
of idealism around having a classless society.
The New Harmony colony in
Indiana is a very interesting place to visit that is just a few hours drive
from here. There were Shaker communities in Kentucky near where I grew up.
There were others in Massachusetts, New York, and Iowa. Some were religious,
and some were decidedly opposed to organized religion. None of them succeeded
for long. I am personally inclined to
believe that they all failed on scale. You need for a nation to be egalitarian
rather than just a community but, as we know from communist nations, idealism
seems to always fall prey to giant egos who manage to grab power, usually by
force.
What I want to leave you
with today is the contrast between the ideal community we have all imagined
where there is no poverty and where people share resources equally, and the
reality we now live in where the ranks of the poor are growing rapidly because
of a radical shift of capital into the hands of the already rich. I do, in
large part, blame the rich and the powerful for creating and defending an
economic system that creates so much suffering and poverty and hunger. But even
more I blame the indifferent masses who have apathetically allowed it to
happen.
As Dorothy Day said, we
have accepted a filthy, rotten, system and we never should have. If you, like
me, do not want to see a violent revolution take place either in our country or
in other democracies, then we have to stop playing along with things like
ending inheritance taxes that allow capital to keep flowing into the hands of a
few super wealthy people. We have to stop quietly acquiescing to cutting healthcare,
education, and pension benefits to the majority of the population.
And, folks, I would
remind you that the crucial point of most of the Civil Rights movement had to
do with voter registration and participation. If you don’t want Russell Brand
to be right about a coming revolution, then the one thing we must do is vote,
and, frankly, I believe that registering voters might be the one thing that
progressive churches should get involved with in a very big way, along with
making voting count more by fighting against Gerrymandering and voter suppression
whether that comes in the form of fewer voting places or higher demands of
photo IDs for voting.
We need to help people to
get involved in voting and what we want to do every week, is to help to inform
people of how they have been tricked in the past into voting against their own
best interests. I am not ready to give up on democracy yet but if we are not
going to give up on it, we really must figure out how to make it work for the
good of all of the people.
