September 23, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Book of Common Prayer lections:
Amos 8: 4-7 (8-12) The morality of the new market economy
Psalm 138 Confitebor tibi, I will give thanks to you
I Timothy 2:1-8 I urge prayers for all in high position that we may lead a
quiet
and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity
Luke 16: 1-13 Make friends by means of dishonest wealth
("all wealth is theft")
Revised Common Lectionary (trial use):
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 Is there no balm in Gilead?
or Amos 8:4-7 Hear this, you that trample the needy
Psalm 79:1-9 Deus, venerunt
or Psalm 113 Laudate, pueri Give praise, you servants
I Timothy 2:1-7 as above, BCP lection
Luke 16: 1-13, as above, BCP lection
"The Free market economy" comes in for a kick in the nalgas in today's Scriptures. We are so brain washed in the western world, the so-called "free world" in which everything has a price tag, that we do not even know how to listen to the Scriptures when they speak to us from outside such a world, such a world-view, as they always do. They speak to us from the viewpoints of crazed prophets and God intoxicated apostles, the view from a bridge to another world. In which Episcopal, Lutheran, or Presbyterian church this morning will these words be heard as having local application: "Listen up, you that grind the destitute and plunder the humble, and who say, 'When will the markets reopen that we may sell?' . . . that we may buy the poor for a coin and the destitute for a pair of Adidas?"
There are several usual responses to such an invitation to "Listen up!", to "Now hear this!" The first response, the traditional one in church, is to make over this rather simple and clear statement of an economic fact into a 'spiritual' matter. Thus, the ones whom Amos saw as 'poor and needy' or 'destitute and humble' are turned into a spiritual category, not the economic underclass of the world, but the 'spiritually humble'. The prophets don't confuse themselves or us with such a definition, into which most of Wall Street could silently slip and slide, as easily as they slipped into the National Cathedral for the prayer services to bless the rockets red glare and the bombs bursting in air. The prophets aren't talking about those who bravely learn to live within their means, when the means is fewer millions, because of an economic slump. It's pretty clear that when Amos said, "Hear this, you who trample on needy people" that he was talking about ordinary garden variety people, who (as he said) couldn't wait for a holiday weekend to end, for the markets to re-open after a terrorist attack. To heck with the holy days, to heck with the sanctification of time, to hell with the Sabbath. "When will the new moon be over, that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we can sell futures in wheat?"
He mentions deceitful packaging. The 'ephah' was about eight gallons. Some of the merchants put false bottoms in such baskets, so they could sell six gallons that looked like eight. (Nowadays they sell a twelve ounce package of breakfast bacon in the same package that used to hold a pound, and charge the same price.) The tricks of the trade haven't changed. Amos says they make the 'ephah' small --the quantity in the package-- but they make the shekel great. The dollar is inflated, or as in Nicaraguat, the Cordoba, so that each incremental inflation robs money from the pockets of the poor. The tortilla gets rolled smaller in the market each week, and the cost in centavos for it rises each month. This is good for business, and so the poor are themselves commoditized, and their lives and labor can be cheaply bought and sold. In our time, "the needy for a pair of shoes" is no mere hyperbole. I paid $100 for my Rockports in Chicago, and that is what a school teacher is paid in Managua for a month's wages.
In Amos's day, the poor could be sold for silver coins, for if you couldn't pay your bills, you and your spouse and children could be sold into slavery to pay off your accounts. Capitalism hung onto chattel slavery until just over a hundred years go, and hasn't graduated yet from its addiction to economic slavery.
Amos says he has heard God "swear by the pride of Jacob:" "I will not forget any of thse transactions. I have kept a record of all these accounts." Amos has not spiritualized his analysis of the market place. He has seen pretty clearly what laissez-faire economics does to the poor and the needy. "Caveat Emptor" -- "Let the buyer beware" -- is the slogan of the market place, the mendacious motto of the merchant. But "Caveat Venditor" is the word of the Prophet. "I will not forget your transactions" says the God of the poor.
"Look! the days are coming," says the Lod God, "When I will send a famine on the land--not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord." In Nicaragua, when Pope John Paul II came here, even he could see what he did not see in the people of the rich countries, among rich people. He said when he came to visit, "There is in the people of this land a deep thirst for God." And everywhere then the thirst was being quenched, as the people of Nicaragua in their Revolutionary process moved towards ending the famine for bread, the thirst for water. Because their spiritual hunger and thirst for justice were satisfied when real bread (not Godtalk) real tortillas and purified water -- Pan Y Agua -- were in those days for the first time in history made available to impoverished communities. That's gone now--the guaranteed Canasta Basica (basic food basket) and access to clean water which the Revolution briefly achieved--was swept away by the New Market Economy, restored by U.S. power at the cost of 55,000 Nicaraguans dead.
In the U.S.of A. and in all the "developed countries" there has been no worry (even in housing projects like Cabrini Green in Chicago) about the purity of drinking water. Managua, when I came here in 1989, was practically the only city in the isthmus where tourists, even, did not have to fear to drink tap water. Even though thousands of people were driven off the land and fled to the cities to avoid the Contra war in the countryside, there was drinking water for all. It was rationed, to be sure, so that there would be enough for all, but when it flowed, it was clean. Now, capitalism and its commoditizing of the basics of life has returned with vengeance, and I have to buy clean drinking water in great bottles or little six packs. The poor must boil it, or get sick. The Contra mercenaries sank the river boat that brought milk from Managua to Bluefields on the east coast, where the Sandinista government rationed it out to infants only. Every child was guaranteed a glass of milk a day. Cantinas in those days had empty bottles on the back-bars, and served only fruit jiuice mixed with rum when they had it. There was thirst in Managua. There was hunger. But they were feasting on the Revolution that had given them back their country for a while, and they feasted on the liberating Word of God.
But in the rich land of north America, there is now a great hunger, and a great thirst, for as Amos said, "The days are coming when I will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.
Televangelists get rid of "Reverend" from in front of their names and put "Doctor" there instead, and write prescriptions for their followers to blow up abortion clinics and throw bombs at mosques. (That's the first sign of trouble--when a preacher without a band-aid in his bundle starts calling himself a Doctor.) They are surprised then when other true believers crash jetplanes into the centers of economic and military might, killing thousands of innocents as well. "They shall run to aed fro"says the prophet, "to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it."
The first response, remember, was to spiritualize the Bible when it talks about Rich and Poor, Greedy and Needy, Famine and Plenty, Hunger and Thirst. And the second response is Avoidance, Transference. To refuse to see ourselves in the mirror. None of this applies to us. It's about THEM. And congregations LOVE preachers and preaching which make easy that task of transference.
One liberation theologian, Blase Bonbane, wryly remarked that the churches are in the business of wholesaling guilt and retailing forgiveness, and therein is their profit margin. We make guilt available very cheaply--we give it away indeed. But we stay in business by our mark-ups on forgiveness. We rain guilt down from the pulpit like an elecric storm and run about selling the umbrellas and lightning rods of religion. But when it comes to the famine of the Word that Amos talks about, the churches are in a real bind. They are part of the problem. The churches have so bought into the capitalist system and are so much a part of the "thought control" system that they successfully peddled it that Socialism was an "evil empire", that Cuba and the Arabs are the successors to the Soviet Union. We never saw ourselves as part of the problem. We do not see that there is a connection between our luxurious lifestyle and the destitution of the Third World. Now we are awakening to find most of the world outraged.
What would Jesus have us to do about all of this? His parable gives us some clues. He tells the story of a shrewd employee who learns that he is about to be sacked by the prosperous merchant whom he serves as bookkeeper. The Wily Coyotie accountant runs around to all his boss's creditors, the people who owe him money for various commodities, which they've bought on credit. And he says to the first one, "the ledger says you owe my boss for a hundred measures of oil. That's a year's production of seventy five olive trees. Why don't we cook the books and say those trees didn't produce that much oil. . How's that? Are we friends now?" And then he goes to the miller and is reminded of his debt for a hundred measures of wheat, a year's production of fifty acres. "Let's cook the books again" and now the debt is only for only eighty measures of wheat. You keep the rest for a profit. One hand washes the other. I'll be looking out for a way to help you now. All of this sounds very much like big city politics in the U. S. of A., or the politics of the Liberales and the Sandinistas in the "Pacto" where one hand washes the other in Managua.
Jesus then says that even the owner was impressed by this cooking of the books, for he saw that his dishonest manager had acted shrewdly. "For the children of this age are more shrewd in making deals than are the children of light." Hang loose to money and its values. Don't use your friends to make money; instead, use money to make friends. Frugal Ben Franklin, on the hundred dollar bill, won't be there at heaven's portal to welcome you--but your friends will be there, if you have valued them more. Be as clever in looking after True Wealth as the world is in looking after false values. The emplyee was arranging things so that when his pink slip came, he'd have some friends left in the world. He could then go round to them and remind them of the favors he had done them. Yes, even the crooked old capitalist himself, hard hearted as he was, was impressed by the shrewdness of his dishonest bookkeeper.
Now Jesus is not here commending us to be crooked, or to cheat, or get ahead by dishonesty, or to use wicked ways to enrich ourselves. But it is clear he saw, before Karl Marx learned it from the libertarian anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon, that "all property is theft." Shrewdness in dealing with the ways of the world is what Jesus is commending, not allowing ourselves to be blinded and brainwashed by the blandishments of the Domination System, but to be as clever in our dealings with it as they are in managing it. Shrewdness in making friends for ourselves even now, in the midst of a world that is passing away, amongst the very ones we have helped the system to defraud in the name of the accumulation of wealth. Shrewdnes in seeing that some of the imbalances of the unjust System are redressed, having foresight to see that the tables may be turned at any moment, and that what will survive the destruction of the system is Friendship, which ought to be for us a higher value than Finance.
I believe it was E.M. Forster who saw Friendship as a higher value than Patriotism when he said that he hoped that if ever he were faced with the dilemma of whether to betray his country or to betray a friend, he hoped he would have the courage not to betray his friend. Friendship is a higher value than money, and Solidarity with those who have been defrauded by Market Capitalism is more important than continued subservience to a system which considers you dispensable anyway. This parable illustrates Marx's comment in 'The Paris Manuscripts', that "Wages are determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker. The capitalist inevitably wins. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker can without him.' The dismissed bookkeeper has become "just another commodity in search of a buyer, and it is a seller's market." But the owner's capital includes the accumulated debt owed to him--and so now the bookkeeper will use it as 'capital' for his own future security. Wiser in his generation than the children of light.
Shrewdness in understnding the relationships of money and power, in seeing how oil, wheat, gasoline and bread, are all related to the coming judgment of God. Get yor head on right about relationships to people as of more value than your relationship to things. Don't let the servants of the system outsmart you, the servants of the Liberator. You cannot serve two masters, two jefes. It is from the Domination System that Jesus is saving you by his gospel. You cannot serve God and Property.
The writer of the letter to Timothy which we heard a part of for the epistle tells us tht we ought in our prayers to pray for everybody, even for government officials and all who are in 'high positions.' The early church wasn't praying for people like the four out-to-pasture ex presidents who went to the National Cathedral to sing the Battle Hymnn of the Republic recently, chaplained by Billy Graham and his sap of a son, who called for "weapons of mass destruction" to be used against terrorists. It was praying instead for people like Nero, who made Saddam Hussein look like a piker. And yet the letter sees, "I urge that prayers be made for all in high position.' Why? "In order that we may lead a quiet life, godly and respectful in every way." Harvey Cox in "The Secular citry" wrote that this attitude towards the Imperial State, what we call 'the federal government', was the beginning of the end of its great power over the human spirit. The early Christians did not, like Jehovah's Witnesses, reject the political authority of the government, for they were willing to pray for the Emperor, but not to burn incense at his altar. They granted the State a particular authority in a very restricted way, but refused to make it "holy" or "sacred" by writing or singing hymns to it, like the Battle Hymn of the Republic or "O say can you see" to the tune of Anacreon in Heaven. The imperial State thought of itself as the Parent of the People and its myth of Romulus and Remus said that the State was descended from the Founding Fathers, genetically. The custom persists in many places to speak of "the fatherland.," or "the motherland" (as in Russia). The State is pater or mater familias to the people. Even though Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin had enough babies out of wedlock (black and white) that many citizens might indeed be their descendants, we do not so easily think of the State as Parent. Saint Augustine wrote that the State has its own good, but that this good is not the highest or truest good. It has no contribution to make to the salvation of humankind. Its duties are to provide us with peace and quiet, with justice and equity. Yet we are willing in the United States to give huge amounts of our incomes to the State, to give (as our Declaration of Independence declares we will do) our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
Augustine also tells us that "God alone is the country of the soul." Yet we sell that citizenship cheaply, and give it away to the National Security State. Every state is godless, for the believer. American chauvinists liked to speak of the communist countries as "atheistic and godless" (indeed, they spoke of themselves that way), yet the early Christians were accused of atheism because they said to the world, "Our God is not in your pantheon". The prophet Hosea told us that God is our Parent, in our midst, and that this God does not come to destroy us, but to save us and show us the way home. Jesus says No One Can Serve Two Masters. And Put Your Money where your best interest lies. Make friends now with it, for when it fails us, you'll have someone to take you in.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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