The Worth of a Person, Part 1

Originally preached at Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church, Durham, NC, February 24, 2013

Ephesians 1:3-14

Just this week the news reported that North Carolina now has the harshest policy for helping the unemployed.  A couple hundred dollars a week for twelve weeks is all that the state is willing to do to help hardworking people hold on while they try to find a job.  Cutting back on money that would all flow directly back into the economy makes little sense.  And as you have heard me say before, penalizing people who lost their jobs because of the immoral, criminal acts of others who destroyed the economy goes against any notions of justice.  It raises a question in our minds about how people value the lives of other people.

What if a stranger were to approach you in this room of people and point out someone, then ask you, “How much does he cost?” or “What is his price?”  Certainly it is not a question you are used to hearing.  After the initial shock, it would probably be an offensive question.  Buying and selling Africans and their descendents remains close at hand in cultural memory in this land.

       Moreover, it seems to our sensibilities a misguided question, a question that transgresses our categories of reasoning.  We are well-schooled in markets and commerce, but not everything is appropriate to a market.  For us, talking about costs or prices is a category mistake when assigned to people.

       On the other hand, if we take the question out of this hypothetical situation and ask it differently, if we change the context around, if we do some critical analysis of events in our world, we might uncover ways in which this kind of question is being asked every day.

       For instance, the debate about making sure everyone has access to good health care is one way of asking what is the worth of a person.  Both of the major political parties are unwilling to support the most efficient way to provide health care, a single-payer plan for universal health care, because they know that funding it would entail changing how we put money into the health care system.  Instead of paying premiums to private companies, the money would flow through a single system by means of taxes. 

Ooooh, that dirty word taxes gets people all stirred up.  When someone starts talking about taxes these days, people start feeling like they are getting their pockets picked.  Don’t bother to explain that most be able to save money by using a single-payer system rather than making their own private payments to for-profit insurance companies or so-called non-profit companies knee-deep in cash that looks to anyone else like big profits.  Somehow the idea of taxes to make sure that no one goes without health care gets people upset.  Apparently, many people think that a whole lot of sick people out here just aren’t worth the money it would take for them to see a doctor or get medication.  

I recognize that many people in Durham, and here in Mt. Level, work in the medical profession.  I am not trying to make you out to be the devils in this story.  What I am talking about are vast structures, powerful systems that enfold patients and medical professionals both.  Strong and powerful interests and lobbies are more concerned about controlling the clinics and machinery of health care than making sure there is justice in how these resources get used.  Controlling the scanners and beds is worth more to them than the people whom those assets can help.  So the perspective of both political parties and the rich donors to whom they listen seems to be that a person is not worth the taxes it would take to provide universal health care.

       Any of you who have been through a difficult illness and watched the bills come in would know that health care currently calls for no small amount of money.   After my beloved Everly spent over a month in the hospital last year, we started seeing stacks of bills from hospitals, clinics, doctors, and labs, and quite a few of them ran as high as five figures before the decimal point.  In the face of winning or losing the battle for Everly’s life, I think you understand that all of those bills together don’t even approach the value of her life.  On the other hand, if we did not have the insurance we have, one or more of those bills might have brought our finances to ruin.  Thanks to God’s provision, I don’t have to stand here and beg for help.  We’ve managed to keep up with our bills because we are blessed with jobs that have insurance coverage.  For the millions of other people without health insurance now, an operation or a hospital stay may be all it takes for them to go broke, to lose their homes, or to fall into endless debt.  They may rightly conclude that their lives, their futures, have been sold out from under them. 

       A news story stirred in my guts late last summer and pushed me toward asking today’s question, “What is a person worth?”.  It is a story out of South Africa.  It’s a complicated story about the economic unrest in a land where masses are unemployed and the gap between rich and poor is vast.  But it is also a story that echoes back to the harsh days of apartheid when mineworkers were fuel and fodder for a violent, industrial machine.  At the largest platinum mine in the world, workers began to strike for better pay.  They make between $450 and $650 a month, which is a wage many other unemployed workers would love to have.  You and I know it would be a struggle to live on that amount.  A new, independent union is asking for $1200 a month.  It’s a big raise they want.  None of us would be surprised that the management does not want to give the raise.  As the stakes began to rise, people on all sides of the disagreement began to escalate.  Management threatened mass firings.  Workers threatened larger and longer strikes.  No doubt some people on either side showed some poor judgment and provocative behavior.  But what happened last summer harkened back to the struggles of organized laborers in South Africa under apartheid, of auto workers demanding better conditions and wages Detroit, of millworkers trying to gain recognition and justice in Gastonia, and people standing up for their worth in so many places.  Armed police were ready for action.  The conflict heated up.  And in a few moments, 34 more mineworkers lay dead.  During a week of unrest and violence some police had also lost their lives. 

Why were people dying?  The mining company was falling behind the goals their management had set for production.  Every day they did not run their mines at full capacity, they lost profits for their shareholders.  Police, also paid a worker’s wage, were brought in to risk their lives for the company’s production goals, and in the process the mineworkers’ lives were also put at risk.  Police and miners died for the sake of trying to get the mines back up to production.  Mining production was traded for the lives of forty-plus miners and police officers.  Killing workers seems thrifty when for every job there are hundreds more applicants who would work for less.  The struggle for jobs in South Africa is so great that competing unions get pitted against one another in these mining struggles, leading to misdirected violence between groups of the disenfranchised.  Death on the front lines of union organizing is not so remote in US history, either.  Is South Africa’s tragedy reminding us of the path that the current world economy is taking us down?  Will US employers soon be willing to trade the lives of their workers for profits in the same way?

In Mississippi, at the same time that these events were unfolding in South Africa, autoworkers at the Nissan plant were laying the groundwork to start a union.  Management threatened to close the plant if they unionize.  Although the same Nissan company operates with union contracts in many of its plants in other countries, they tell their employees in Mississippi that their lives are worth just so much.  If it means the hard work of their Mississippi workers would cost them a few cents more, then they would rather shut down their plant and stop making all those cars and all that money.  They would rather go find other desperate and beaten down people who won’t cost them so much, who aren’t worth much.  With automobile companies raking in the profits, an experienced, loyal worker is still not worth enough to have the company sit down at the table and arrive at an agreement fair to all parties. 

The Mississippi and South Africa stories remind me of a pair of texts in Isaiah.  Chapter 58 echoes chapter 1.  The prophet proclaims that God is not happy with the show he is seeing, a showiness of piety and outward worship.  The wealthy, who are putting on the show, are complaining that they have fasted but God did not give them what they wanted.  Isaiah speaks in the words of these unfaithful oppressors when he says, “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”  Then he gives them God's reply,

Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,
and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.

            Oppressing workers, treating them violently—this was how the wealthy employers of Isaiah’s day were behaving. But we remember also from the first chapter of Isaiah that God offered a path to resolution of their sins for these people abusing their brothers and sisters. The KJV says, “Come, let us reason together.” The NRSV puts it more bluntly, “Come, let’s argue it out.” Sitting at the table, working out a path of mutual interest is what God would have us do. A solution to oppression is one that will be mutually agreeable to all parties and in accordance with the justice of God. Without it, all the dancing and shouting and fasting and praising turns out to be bad acting that makes God sick and angry with looking at us. God made us all, every one of us, because of love. God loves every person. God counts each one of us as good, as valuable, as worth being heard, being cared for, and being able to share in the bounty of this world. Reasoning that through in a way to be fair to everyone is what God expects. A person is worth that kind of effort.

"The Worth of a Person" is continued in Part 2, the next post.

 

Rachel Weeping

Another day, another massacre.  This is where we have arrived.  Psychologists have studied the pattern by which people become desensitized to violence.  Although there are plenty of arguments about what such desensitization might mean for future human actions, there seems to be an agreement that exposure to acts of violence over time has the effect of reducing emotional responses, sensitivity, to subsequent exposure to violent acts.

Once, television viewers had little experience of the grotesque images of death in war.  Then reporters from Vietnam began to dispatch film of the horrors of that war.  Eventually, the dinnertime news viewing included a daily dose of explosions and war.  Now, the instantaneous images of weapons, explosions, dismemberment, and death, are round-the-clock backdrops for ads to shop at Target or take Cialis, but avoid four-hour erections.

The regularity of mass shootings in the US is making them blend into the background.  I sadly admit that I read the headline about Newtown, CT, on my screen, clicked to get a few details, and went back to whatever I was doing.  It was barely a blip on my daily rounds.  The facts of a young man killing his own mother and also killing kindergartners, continued to work on me, so I can say with some relief that I am not utterly desensitized.

What became obvious to me, as I seek to be formed by the Christian calendar and live these days in the Season of Advent, was that church people would need to turn to Matthew's text on the slaughter of the innocents.

A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more (NRSV).

I was not alone in this judgment, and various fellow-travelers began to write about these words.  I was even blessed to hear a sermon on this text on Sunday morning.  I posted on facebook that I was glad not to have to preach today because of the danger of sounding smug:  Christians sometimes sound like they can pretend bad stuff is not so bad since they know how everything is going to turn out in the end.  But that is a little bit of a cop-out.  Lots of other preachers had to step into the pulpit whether they felt ready, capable, or not.

I think what speaks most loudly to the church in this moment is that the so-called best country in the world is no less marked by the radicality of evil than was the land of God's chosen people twenty centuries ago.  In Bethlehem's case, it was a powerful ruler exercising ruthless power to try to cut off any challenges to his dynasty, even if it meant killing babies.  In Newtown, we only can begin to imagine the tortured mind of a killer who plans and executes the murder of little children.

In both cases, we find ourselves living in a world armed and capable of massive, unexpected, unspeakable violence.  Someone within reach of all of us could carry it out, whether it be under orders in an electronically furnished bunker controlling unmanned Predator drones, or it be an unknown, largely unnoticed average guy picking up a gun here, some bullets there, planning, plotting, stirring up the impulse borne of rage, recklessness, anomie, or whatever drives such methodical, industrial, technical, prolific, cold, steely murder.

In everyday places--theaters, malls, classrooms, sidewalks, office towers--unspeakable violence can and does erupt.  In Nigeria and Pakistan it can happen in church, or on a train.  In Iraq it may be in a mosque or in a crowd on pilgrimage.  In Gaza and Israel it's on a bus or in the workplace.  In Wazyristan it's at a wedding.  In Afghanistan its among a group of girls learning to read.  In Congo it's in a village that got in the way of a war.  In all these places, even in our own hometowns, evil organizes, buys and sells its wares, seduces and steals hearts, corrupts intellect, breeds violence.

Rachel weeps and continues weeping for her children.  On that day long ago, Mary escaped with the little one, Jesus, and fled to another country where he continued his childhood as an undocumented immigrant, a refugee, a boy on the run.  So many other mothers were not so fortunate.  They were not consoled, because their babies were no more.  They would not see them play again.  They would not get to feed them again.  They would not see them grow, make them new clothes when they outgrew the old ones.  They had left only a long emptiness.

The kind of love that endures, relives, cherishes the moments, longs for one more shared embrace, is itself a sign of the depth of love we might find in God.  The mothers who weep in Gaza and Israel, in Columbine and Newtown, are themselves the image of a God who weeps.

It's not a day to say something sweet and neat about God's ultimate victory.  The boy in Bethlehem whose parents helped him flee infanticide, as a grown man eventually had to run away to Galilee after the next king in the dynasty beheaded his cousin and was looking for him.  The mother who was blessed to see her son live to adulthood had to witness his murder at the hands of another ruler from another land.  Rachel is weeping and is not consoled.  It is not the will of God that any should perish.  Today we try not to sink into the abyss by gingerly letting our feet and our tears fall on the breadth of God's sorrow at the way humanity dispatches our brothers and sisters without regret.  Today we hope against hope that such a God may one day deliver us.