Open Hearts Mean Open Hands, Part 3

This the last part of a sermon continued from the two previous posts.

Deuteronomy 15:1-11
Acts 4:31-35
Durham CAN and other organizations like ours, in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Boston, Washington, D. C., New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, and London, England, have decided that it is time to take a stand against usury. The campaign, launched simultaneously in many cities on July 22, is called “10% Is Enough.” We are calling on the CEOs of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Mechanics and Farmers, SunTrust, and other banks to put a cap on consumer interest rates at 10%. We are also calling on Congress to pass a usury law and restore a reasonable cap on consumer interest. Professors like Mt. Level ministers Dr. Turner, Dr. Jennings, Dr. Carter, and I all endorsed a theological statement on the economy, along with professors from nine divinity schools and seminaries in North Carolina and South Carolina. This statement has been sent to bank CEOs and to pastors as part of this campaign. We want the bankers to realize this message is deeply rooted in our tradition. And we Protestant Christian professors do not stand alone.

The social teachings of the Catholic Church have a long history of making a clear stand for economic justice, for example the encyclical of Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, explicitly implicates usury in what he observed as a growing oppression and exploitation, saying working people “have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “Those whose usurious and avaricious dealings lead to the hunger and death of their brethren in the human family indirectly commit homicide,” and directly quotes from Deuteronomy 15:11 to emphasize the many ways in which we are exhorted to “open wide our hands” to the poor.

Of course, when Christians draw heavily on texts from Deuteronomy or Amos or other texts from the Jewish Scriptures in our efforts to articulate a theology of economic life, we show our indebtedness to and sharing in the narrative of God’s calling of Israel. Over recent months, Jewish Rabbis in North Carolina have joined this conversation about the economy. In this week, the holiest season of the Jewish year, our brothers and sisters of the covenant are reflecting on their lives under the Rule of God, the Maker of heaven and earth. As the season of the new year—Rosh Hashanah has passed and Yom Kippur is coming—it is the time in which the Sabbath year or Jubilee year would be proclaimed. God’s rule over all of life is the concern of liturgy and prayer. Thus this season is linked with economic justice and the plight of the weak and marginalized. The story of God’s deliverance of Isaac when he was bound on the altar is a central text, and we can see in it the symbolic binding of the poor by oppressive economic systems of low wages, inescapable debt, and unattainable basic provisions. These High Holy Days are days of repentance and resolution. Repentance is a leaving behind, but also a taking up. Thus, in the economy it means leaving behind injustice and taking up the cause of those unjustly treated. It is taking up the calling of tikkun olam, to mend the world.

Islam continues in our day to practice an economic system which opposes usury, which in Arabic is called riba. Our Muslim brothers and sisters in North Carolina have also composed a document for reflection in their communities, revealing ways that the Qur’an teaches about justice in economic relations. Rather than loaning at interest, Islamic societies have developed creative ways to allow investment in which benefits and risks are shared by both borrower and lender. This kind of thinking about God’s creation as something shared by all people equally is deeply imbedded in Islamic teaching, and their witness to it reawakens truths in Christian teaching that have been overshadowed by modern economic ideas. To our shame, too many Christians have sold this common birthright for a mess of pottage in the empty promises of modern economics.

The faith communities do not always agree on everything, but we do agree on some things. One, above all, is that God is the ruler of all creation, and that we are responsible to God to live in right relationship with one another according to justice. Moreover, we all agree on the specific admonition that usury, the financial exploitation of the poor and weak, is wrong no matter when or how it is done, or what it is called.

But, why, you ask, does the church bother with such things as interest rates and health care access? Why don’t we just focus on saving souls? I’m glad you asked that, and probably most of you know the answer. We are concerned about economic justice and the health of all people because Jesus came to save whole people, whole communities, the whole of creation. This is not just some obscure ancient Jewish law about the economy that has become irrelevant in Christ. Jesus said he did not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it. He said he came to set at liberty the oppressed. He came to heal. He came to bring abundant life. He came that we might now live in the foretaste of the glory of eternal life.

The passage from Acts which we read helps us to know that this is what Jesus came to do. His earliest followers realized the connection between Deuteronomy 15 and Jesus’ preaching and atoning work. In words which quote from Deuteronomy 15:4, Acts 4:34 says, “There was not a needy person among them.” They saw themselves as living out the promise of God that when we share with one another we can all have what we need. Martin Luther, the great reformer, wrote a treatise against usury in which he said we ought “to be bound . . . to allow no one to suffer want or to beg.”

But again, you may ask, how is it that getting so concerned about economic justice can go together with Christian concern for saving souls? The answer is in understanding that God is a God of grace. God offered Israel a better way of life in Deuteronomy. It was a way of life that would allow them to take on the character of the God who delivered them from oppression, slavery, and perpetual poverty. If they would remember that whatever prosperity they have is the gift of the God who brought them out of Egypt, then they could understand that it is always grace that sustains them. And if God is gracious enough to allow us to prosper, then we ought to become like God and see that others also can prosper. As God has given us blessings, we ought to bless one another.

What a transformation grace can bring in a human being! What a transformation grace can bring to a community! God made us in the divine image, and when we deny our true character and nature by sins of greed, hatred, selfishness, and indifference, God is not satisfied to leave us there. So in the midst of a sinful world system, God comes to deliver us. God wants us to be free of the oppression of others and free of the oppression we impose on ourselves through our sins. God is a gracious God. God loves us too much to let us stew in our own juices. God is a gracious God. God wants us all to know the love that is possible in human community, the love God created us for. God is a gracious God. We are made to love one another. We are made to love one another. We are made to love one another, and in loving one another we are the image of God. In loving one another, God’s grace flows through us, and God’s glory shines forth from us. Let the glory of God shine forth through you. Let the love of God flow to the ones who are struggling with debt, without health care, who are losing their homes. Stand up as a witness of God’s grace in creation that usury is wrong and must be stopped.

Does anybody want to live in the image of God? Does anybody want to receive and give grace as a way of life?

Maybe you are one of the people being swept away in the tide of economic troubles. Powerful forces in the world are dragging you out into deeper waters, and you feel out of control. You aren’t sure what your destiny will be. The God of grace wants to deliver you. After the service, we will collect names and contact information for people who would like to get some guidance in dealing with their financial situations. Both Mount Level Missionary Baptist Church and the Durham County Extension Office will be offering financial training to help with budgeting and indebtedness, to help you work toward financial freedom. We want to facilitate this because we believe that the God of grace wants to deliver you.

Maybe you are struggling with temptations to be selfish and tightfisted. Maybe you are fighting feelings of looking down on people who are in financial difficulty and in need of help. God wants to restore you to your true loving nature. God wants to give you grace to grow into the true divine image, to be a beacon of God’s glory and a vessel of God’s grace.

Open your hearts to God and to one another now. Open your hands to the people in need whom God sends your way. Open hearts mean open hands. May the grace of God be with you all.

Bailout 11: Market Morality Won't Just Vanish

The assumption of much public policy making is that getting the money in the right place or setting up the right program will solve problems. Of course, these things can and do make a difference. However, as Cornel West argued long ago, changing the conditions of extreme poverty will not go away just by setting up programs. Nor will they go away by telling the people caught up in poverty to change their behavior. Culture and social structures are interlinked. That is why he wrote about "market morality." When social thinking becomes colonized and dominated by doctrinaire market theories, then other forms of moral vision and community begin to be eclipsed by individual self-interest. That is why West called for a "politics of conversion:" the change has to be deep and it has to be systemic.

Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux have picked up this argument in relation to the current bailout of the economy. They recognize that new views of the economy are gaining a hearing, but they also point out that the general population has been schooled in free market thinking and its market morality. A change that renews the commitment to the common good, a belief in government's role to do good for citizens, and moral limits on individual freedom will require a process of education.

Politics is not simply about the production and protection of economic formations; it is also about the production of individuals, desires, identifications, values and modes of understanding for inhabiting the ideological and institutional forms that make up a social order. At the very least, any attempt to both understand the current crisis and what it would mean to produce a new kind of subject willing to invest in and struggle for a democratic society needs to raise another set of questions in addition to those currently posed.

Moral formation of another sort is required. Are there any communities of alternative formation that can point the direction toward a more humane vision of economic life? Churches too often have allowed the economics of the world to negate the economic vision of the Bible. We need churches to stand for an economic life in which "there are no needy among you" (Deuteronomy 15:4; Acts 4:34).

Can Anyone Listen to Jeremiah Wright?

I was listening to a reading of Acts 6:8-7:8, the story of the arrest of Stephen. It struck me that certain elements of this story are echoed in the recent public ridicule of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I am not saying it is an allegory with one-to-one correspondence of events. Certainly Wright has not been arrested, and he has not been executed. I'm not one to apply the term "crucifixion" to any kind of attack on a preacher--that is poor biblical interpretation, the wrong way to apply the identification of the disciple with Jesus.

Yet it still strikes me that there are similarities in the stories.

First, it was a concerted effort to discredit him. They took the opportunity to attack him by instigating people to distort what he had said. By doing this, they stirred up the people and various leaders to challenge him for claims that he did not make. I have for some time considered that the "high priests" of the religion of American consumer culture are the news anchors. They are the public face of the production of culture, of the propaganda machine of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. In the preaching of Jeremiah Wright, they saw an opportunity to stir people up. They knew they had a commodity that would sell, so they strategically used their resources to make the attack.

Second, they distorted his message. They said he spoke blasphemy against Moses and God. The attack on Jeremiah Wright, with modern technological sophistication, used video clips to make Wright's preaching into something it was not. No more nefarious example is the clip from a sermon in which he contrasted the blessing and the curse which God spoke through the prophets. It is a biblical message. It is applicable to all earthly principalities, thrones, dominions, and authorities that depart from the divinely ordered path. But they claim Wright is too harsh on America, that he is spouting hate toward America.

Third, they accused him of attacking the national icons, God, the law, and the house of worship. Wright's words of judgment on the U. S. imperial habits of violence and exploitation were taken as offense toward the god of national exceptionalism. The U. S., as the chosen people of god, is supposed by many chauvinists to be the true bearer of god's purposes in the world. Even many of those who would balk at such a claim, would still hold the U. S., its flag, its president, and its mythology of goodness in high esteem and despise those who would criticize their nation. These people do not understand biblical faith, so they refuse to accept that Wright was proclaiming a biblical message. Instead, they distort it to be an attack on all that is good about America.

Fourth, as Stephen begins to answer the charges, he goes back in history to talk about key events of the past in which God's work has been evident. But they don't like his account of history. Wright's critics say that he is still angry about events hundreds of years in the past. They say he should leave the past in the past and look at the present. They cry that the evils of the past are not our fault and irrelevant to today. But Wright insists that in looking at the past we understand the present better. Slavery has been outlawed, but its legacy remains. Saying it's over does not make that legacy disappear automatically.

Fifth, the story Stephen tells begins by talking about Abraham sojourning away from his home to a land where he has no possession. Then he goes on to talk about a people who become enslaved and mistreated for centuries. And he reminds them that God promised judgment on the nation who enslaved them. Now it is not the same story as that of Africans kidnapped, transported, and enslaved on a continent expropriated by Europeans. But there are similarities, and the recognition of God's judgment on a nation is very clear.

If there were to be an honest, listening conversation about the value of Jeremiah Wright's message to the contemporary U. S. society, then reflection on the Stephen story might offer a few insights into how an outspoken prophet from a minority group can be manipulated and ostracized.