“Devaluing Humans” 8-11-19 Dr Roger Ray
Amos 8:4-6
Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land,5 saying, "When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances,6 buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat."
I grew up in rural Kentucky but even way back then, the only people I knew who had chickens were my aunt and uncle who lived on the family farm. I never had to watch the process, but I knew that there was a one to one relationship between the chickens I had seen running around in the farmhouse yard and the battered and fried variety that Aunt Maxine put on the dining room table.
But it was virtually unheard of for most families, who lived in neighborhoods, to keep chickens. We got our eggs at the store and our chicken either came in a KFC bucket or on a little plastic tray covered in plastic wrap. But a few years ago, it become fashionable, once again, to keep chickens in your backyard.
Your friends will tell you about how great it is to have all those fresh eggs. But here is a thing about chickens: they will lay eggs for one or two years, generally speaking, but they will live for up to ten years. My aunt and uncle did not name their chickens. They did not hug their chickens. They did not get excited about collecting exotic chickens nor did they sit around the living room with their friends telling stories about the chickens.
In fact, my friends, Paul and Josie, and I were recently having dinner with someone who lives on a farm. When this woman casually mentioned cooking her non-laying hens, Josie waited for a private moment to mention to me that we should never hang out with that evil women ever again.
So, you see, when I say, “I love chicken,” it means something entirely different from when Josie says, “I love my chickens.” But, it is not just farmers and butchers who have to maintain some objective distance from the objects of their profession. Have you ever known a surgeon very well? Can you imagine yourself being a surgeon? Frankly, I can’t. There was never a moment when I was tempted to apply to go to a medical school. Even in an effort to do good, I cannot imagine putting a scalpel, or, God forbid, a circular saw, on a living human being.
But, there are people we need to have in society who don’t hug their chickens and who are able to put enough distance between themselves and their patients to not think of that person getting a new knee as someone who likes to ride bikes, dance, and play tag with their grandchildren . . . at least during the surgery.
But you don’t want me to see you that way, right? We don’t want our teachers to see their students that way. A normal person, just a decent person for whom basic empathy and compassion makes it impossible for them to eat a chicken that they are familiar with, and let me tell you, I have had to take care of my friends’ chickens a few times and building a relationship with these pea brained skittery poopers does not happen easily, but it does happen.
So, imagine my surprise a couple of weeks ago when I heard on the news that a school district in Pennsylvania sent a letter to the parents of students who had unpaid bills in the school lunch room, telling them that if they didn’t pay their bill 
that their children might be taken from them and put in foster care. I know that you want to think that I am exaggerating and, I’ll admit, if it were not for exaggeration preachers wouldn’t have a job, but this is a hard, cold fact. Here is the letter.
Joseph Muth is the school administrator who wrote the letter. He seemed to want to avoid contact with the media. I wanted to show you his picture in case you ever see him in an airport, or at Silver Dollar City, or anywhere that you might convey my heartfelt contempt for him and his ilk. One school district official did quip, “Well, it worked.”
How does someone whose career is in education, in the care and nurture of children, come to see poor school children in about the same way that my uncle viewed the chickens in his front yard just before Sunday dinner?
The ancient Judean prophet, Amos, rode his donkey up to preach among his wealthy relatives to the north, and made fun of them saying that they could hardly wait for church to be over so that they could get back to making money, buying and selling, squeezing the margins…. He says, “making the measure of wheat small,” to get more money for your product until, he says, you buy the poor for silver and the needy for the cost of a pair of shoes.
How do we get to that point? How does money come to be so important and people become little more than a commodity?
One of the most memorable days of my seminary education was in a pastoral counseling course with the late Dr. Liston Mills. He said to us, “No one can love more than seven or eight people at any time and generally we are doing well if we even care about more than two or three.” I was a student pastor at that time with 70 or 80 church members. I was also doing my clinicals in counseling and I saw 15 to 20 counseling clients ever week. I thought I was a good pastor, a good therapist, and I insisted that I loved all of these people… how could I not?
Mills had a way of saying things like they were just unassailable facts that would make me so mad that I just couldn’t hide my disdain for his hard, cynical, take on human nature. . . I was sitting at my desk here in Springfield when I reflected back on that conversation 20 years later and realized that I was no longer in touch with any of those people I so adamantly insisted that I had loved and could hardly remember the names of any of them. Before he died, I wrote about a dozen letters of thanks and apology to Liston Mills, apologizing for what a difficult student I had been, and thanking him for being the colossal jerk of a professor that he was.
My point is that no one can love everyone. It is easy to allow ourselves to be dismissive of most of the people in the world. If we are not going to treat people like commodities, use them for profit, squeeze the humanity out of them to take their lunch money, then we have to make a conscious decision not to go down that path.
We can’t love everyone, on a good day, we might only even care about a few people, so we dismiss people for differences in race, politics, economic class, age, weight, sexual orientation. How could a young governor with political aspirations make fun of bodies of citizens stacked up outside of a morgue in San Juan? How could a school administrator literally frighten parents and little kids with separation and foster care, not even for illegally crossing the southern border, as obscene as that whole mess is, but for $20 or $30 of school lunch room debt?
But, you know, being the governor of Puerto Rico got a lot harder after Hurricane Maria . . . so, some gallows humor with your peers while working in a pressure cooker of recovery. And managing a budget and federal programs in a huge $80 million operation, you just start looking at spread sheets and you take out your #2 pencil and you start looking for the holes you can fill. Humanity gets lost.
Though I sure do miss Barak Obama these days, I remember reading about his use of drones in Iraq and Afghanistan and being horrified. They would send these robot planes into a village to blow up a house where a suspected terrorist was living, and the explosion would obviously kill family members and sometimes neighbors and kids playing in the street and women hanging up laundry in the back. And I read that the military, to deal with these civilian casualties, redefined anyone in the vicinity of a terrorist’s home as an enemy combatant. Just as many dead people, but if you define them as combatants rather than civilians, then you are not a moral monster, but you just promoted yourself to brilliant military tactician.
But even that inscrutable inhumanity pales in comparison to the way that #MachinegunMitch McConnell is slow-walking a senate response to the current 
cry for greater gun control. He is making noises about what the senate will discuss but he is doing in the classic, insincere, slow way that he always does, assuming that the public will be horrified by last weekend’s mass murders for just a few weeks and things will all be forgotten . . . the way we forgot about Sandy Hook, Aurora, Charleston, Orlando, Las Vegas, Stoneman Douglass High School, and the Pittsburg Synagogue. More than a half million Americans have died from guns since McConnell first went to the senate and he is as protective of the NRA today as he was when he arrived in 1984.
No one can love everyone so, to save energy, I gave up trying to love Mitch a long time ago.
Look, folks, a couple of months ago, to stop my doctor from whining all of the time, I agreed to start lifting weights again. I have a full set of dumbbells on a rack in my home office that has been gathering dust for the past three or four years, so, I looked up a workout routine for men of a certain age, and set out to do the right thing.
A couple of hours and a few Advil later, I found my way up to the fitness shop to buy some lighter weights. It was humiliating, but I just couldn’t lift even the lightest weights I had used in my previous fitness routine. I’m a walker and a bike rider, but I’m not sure that I could have bench pressed a can of corn. Love is like that. I’m serious. Love is like that.
And if we fail to exercise our sincere compassion and empathy for others, we will lose the ability to do it very well. I’m not saying that there is a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Mussolini lurking about within in us. We are not monsters. None of us would find any thrill in becoming more like Charles Manson. But I am saying that there is a natural drift towards indifference. Because we cannot love everyone, there is a passive willingness to use people, to take the suffering of others for granted.
There may be a Joseph Muth within us. Some of the rough, dismissive, elitism of a Ricardo Rossello, or the cruel indifference of a Mitch McConnell may be within us if we do not choose to be concerned about those we do not know who also suffer.
Okay, let me dial that back a bit. I’m over selling this.
At the Abby of Gethsemane, the famous Trappist monastery in Kentucky where I go on retreat, there is a modern statue of a very intent looking and forward leaning statue of St. Bernard of Clarvaux, and there is a sash across his chest that reads, “Amo quia amo,” which translates, “I love that I may love.” I have stared at that statue for 30 years and it was not until recently that I think that I know what this obscure French saint was meaning to say. I love that I may learn better how to love. I love that I may grow stronger in my ability to love.
I love those near to me that I may be able to love those who are far from me. I love those who are dear to me that I may one day be able to love those whom I now loath. I know what my counseling professor meant . . . we cannot muster the emotional energy to love everyone the way we may love a spouse, a child, one or two dear friends, but we can refuse to forget that the children of the poor who cannot pay for their school lunch are also children who deserve love. I may not be saint enough to sell everything I own and send the money to Hurricane Maria victims in Puerto Rico, but I will not make light of their suffering nor insulate myself from feeling the grief of those who have lost loved ones.
No one in my family or circle of friends were shot and killed at Columbine, in Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Sandy Hook, Stoneman Douglas High School, or in El Paso, or Dayton but I know this, if we allow ourselves to fall back into indifference that somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 more people will be shot and killed in America by this time next year.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Against the all too human tendency to withdraw, to insulate ourselves against the pain of the world by retreating into a cocoon of cynicism and anger, I am asking you to exercise your love, to stretch to love more so that you will remember the children in dog cages in detention centers along our border, the children whose parents are buying them bullet proof backpacks to take to school this year, and the kids whose parents don’t have lunch money to send with them. Amo quia amo.
