Isaiah and Economic Justice 9: Blinded by Greed

Isaiah 9:8-16

The Lord sent a word against Jacob,
    and it fell on Israel;
and all the people knew it—
    Ephraim and the inhabitants of Samaria—
    but in pride and arrogance of heart they said:
“The bricks have fallen,
    but we will build with dressed stones;
the sycamores have been cut down,
    but we will put cedars in their place.”
So the Lord raised adversaries against them,
    and stirred up their enemies,
the Arameans on the east and the Philistines on the west,
    and they devoured Israel with open mouth.
For all this his anger has not turned away;
    his hand is stretched out still.
The people did not turn to him who struck them,
    or seek the Lord of hosts.
So the Lord cut off from Israel head and tail,
    palm branch and reed in one day—
elders and dignitaries are the head,
    and prophets who teach lies are the tail;
for those who led this people led them astray,
    and those who were led by them were left in confusion.

The ninth chapter of Isaiah begins with a familiar advent passage.  It celebrates the end of oppression and the coming of a wise and just ruler.  This ruler will be born for greatness and receive titles of honor such as "Prince of Peace."  Peace, Justice, Righteousness--this is the way of God which Isaiah announced.

The second half of the chapter warns the reader not to expect this blessed revolution just yet.  Even though judgment has already begun to befall the people of Israel and Judah, the leaders and the elite have not listened.  It is just as chapter 6 said.  They will look but not understand.  Having felt the sting of judgment, the people in charge decided to "speak their blessing into existence."  Against all evidence, they said they would build fancier houses and restore their woodlands with even more luxurious trees.

As the earlier chapters of Isaiah have shown, the only way they will build fancier houses and enrich their lands is by further oppressing the poor.  They have not sought to know the Lord better and to understand what would please God.  They have not comprehended God's love for justice.  All they have thought is that they deserve to live the high life, so they will do what it takes to get back to it.

Again, the misleaders have appeared.  Elders, dignitaries, and prophets who teach lies have led the whole nation astray.  They are bringing on the judgment of God, not listening to the faithful message which calls Israel to be a nation in which all people share in the bounty of God's creation.

After the quoted text, Isaiah hits the hard part of the judgment.  It deals with the suffering inflicted on the whole people.  Some have created unjust structures and benefited from others' hardships.  The others were left with confusion.  Judah's leaders had build an unjust and corrupt system.  Such a system comes from the basest motives of selfishness, lust, and greed.  In a world designed around selfishness, lust, and greed, everyone is trying to gain an advantage and use whoever they can to fulfill their insatiable corrupt desires.

Further toward the end of the chapter it says that they devoured their own kin.  Manasseh and Ephraim fought each other, and they both turned on Judah.  Scheming, stealing, fighting, killing--the sins of oppression grow ever more evil and deadly.  Everyone pays the price, even widows and orphans who did not bring it on themselves.  Any sign of weakness gives someone else permission to crush and plunder.  That is what will happen when Assyria and Babylon get ready to pounce.

What Isaiah is describing happens in our workplaces.  It happens in our neighborhoods.  It happens on the City Planning Commission, at the country club, in the board room, at the elite restaurants.  It happens anywhere that people stop thinking of the vulnerable and start thinking of ways to leverage their connections to gain from the unsuspecting and unrepresented.

I have had a generally good impression of Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright since I first looked at some of his writing about six years ago. We have been on the same program at the Shaw University Divinity School Minister's Conference, and he was complimentary concerning my remarks. I have known more than one person who told me of Wright's influence on her or his ministry.

I was impressed to learn of Barack Obama's membership in Wright's church and his conversion to Christian faith in part under Wright's influence. This connection caused me to look more seriously at Obama's candidacy in those early days when a dozen or more people were running for president. Although I understand Obama's continuing statements to distance himself from his former pastor, I regret that he is doing it.

When Wright became the object of infotainment programming and talking heads a while back, I listened to some brief selections from his sermons on YouTube. I have to say that I found nothing troubling in what I heard. I quickly concluded that the sermon in which God's damnation was stated sounded very much like the prophetic writings of the Bible which Wright clearly indicated that he was imitating. In Jesus' teachings, he pronounced "woes" upon various cities for seemingly lesser offenses than Wright was detailing concerning the United States.

Any Bible reader knows that the Hebrew prophets' words are often much more X-rated than anything Wright had to say. If people are taking offense at Jeremiah Wright's sermons, then they would take offense at the Bible and prophetic preaching from any source. If perhaps there is a more obvious use of biblical precedent in shaping black prophetic preaching than white church-going people are currently accustomed to hearing, then what we are observing is more a rejection of their own past by white churches than a shockingly intensive level of conviction on the part of black churches.

As for the observation about "chickens coming home to roost," it is a common saying. Wright's sermon refers to a former ambassador who uses this phrase, once used by Malcolm X (which led to his censure by and eventual departure from the Nation of Islam), to describe the conditions under which attacks were made upon the United States. Nothing about the saying excuses the vicious acts of terror. Yet as an observation about how "what goes around, comes around," it could not be more accurate about the results of U. S. aggression and economic exploitation across the world. According to Voice of America, more than $24 billion of military products were supplied to Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern countries by the U. S. this past year. As Ched Myers has said, the United States is addicted to violence. The litany of U. S. military adventurism and terroristic policies is long and tragic, costing the lives of Native Americans, kidnapped Africans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Nicaraguans, Panamanians, Guatemalans, Granadans, Haitians, Filipinos, protesting college students, and on and on. Relying on violence leads to violence. Martin Luther King, Jr., said it in 1958 this way

force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe.

Although his word was "begets," it still means the same as "chickens coming home to roost." And King was a harsh critic of the U. S. and its foreign policy. He said

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

And also,

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.

These words brought great criticism and abuse on Dr. King. Nowadays we like to treat him as a teddy bear, cute and cuddly. But he was a prophetic preacher who castigated the U. S. for its violence, oppression, and war. Having forgotten the way he was hated in his time, a new generation has found another preacher to castigate.

A final matter from his speeches has to do with the comments about the HIV virus. I do not believe that it is a manufactured virus designed to kill blacks or any other group. However, as Wright said, he does not put this sort of strategy of intentional infection beyond the realm of possibility for the United States. Many people now know of the intentional infliction of suffering on blacks during the Tuskeegee syphilis study. Fewer are aware of the persistent tactic of the U. S. government's giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native American villages in order to kill the inhabitants. Wright cites the contradictory and hypocritical policy of the U. S. toward Iraqi use of biological weapons when the U. S. is the supplier of those very weapons to Iraq.

To top this all off, the document "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century," raises the spectre of a new type of biological weapon that selectively kills people according to their genes. In other words, weapons that can select people according to their ethnicity. Israel and Apartheid South Africa are reputed to have done research on this kind of weapon to use against their enemies in ethnic warfare. Now they find an exploratory endorsement in a document which lists Lewis Libby and Paul Wolfowitz as contributors, for an organization that names Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Weigel, Elliott Abrams, William Bennett, Jeb Bush, Norman Podhoretz, and others as endorsers. On page 60 it says the following.

And advanced forms of biological warfarethat can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.

Is the U. S. government capable of such an act? Yes. Do I think the HIV virus is a creation of the government? No, but I can see why someone might be suspicious.

Jeremiah Wright is speaking up in a prophetic voice. I am thankful for his courage to say what he is saying.