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Matthew 5:1-11, 6:7-15
The Rev. R. Byron Breese
Rollins Chapel, Dartmouth College
1 May 2008
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner; may my words be acceptable to
you. Amen.
During the 1990s, having been the pastor of the first American Baptist
congregation in Monmouth County NJ to boldly open membership to the LGBTQ
communities, I would like to first acknowledge the programmatic intent of this
day during PRIDE week, though my sermon will deal with another topic of equally
pressing concern. Matters of inclusion and justice go hand in hand and,
as the lawyer and novelist, John Grisham put it at a recent, national gathering
of Baptists in Atlanta: "Who are we kidding when we try to exclude? God
made all of us. He loves all of us equally, and He expects us to love and
respect each other without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, biblical
interpretation, denominations or other religions." So, I’d like to echo
him: who are we kidding when we ignore the fact that money and justice go hand
in hand. It seems to me we have been kidding ourselves.
I do not recall being explicitly aware until I was twenty-something that
other Christians said the Lord’s Prayer differently. I grew up in a small
American Baptist church in rural, believe it or not, New Jersey – and there we
only ever said “debts” and “debtors.” As with so many things in life,
what and how one hears and understands; experiences and feels, words, beliefs
or circumstances may only change with a change of context. And for me,
living in New England and working at Dartmouth is a real change of context,
especially moving here from upstate New York – and not just because I’m a
Yankees fan. Two decades ago, I lived in England and the famous reserve
and circumlocution of the English has nothing on the same behavior practiced by
New Englanders. As an eminent colleague of mine
in Institutional Diversity said, “Most everyone I know here at Dartmouth came
from somewhere else; just give it two years and you’ll start acting like you’ve
always lived here.” Gasp! Even my co-worker from south central Los
Angeles admitted that he now says, “Yyyop.” But, that’s just a
word. Well, in ‘New Englander’ it’s a word. But is “debts” in
“forgive us our debts” just a word?
The Greek
word in Matthew that is rendered as “debts” carries both the sense of
“something owed” and a “fault.” That is, it is both a financial and a
moral obligation. It is clear, I believe, that the intent of Jesus’
teachings is both. We tend to forget that the context of the Lord’s
Prayer is within the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon. And it is also
intimately connected in that same context with the Beatitudes, these most
historically important images and metaphors for the prophetic hope of Jesus –
and of the poor, oppressed, disposed who likely heard his teaching on that
day. For the wealthy, privileged and powerful who also may have heard him
then and there it’s likely for a few there was the ringing of conscience, but
probably just as much there was the confusion, mystification and dismissal by
those whose lives were all too comfortable.
In terms of the versions of the Lord’s Prayer that the various Christian
traditions use, we can rightly understand “debts,” “trespasses” or “sins” as
useful metaphors at the same time as we feel them literally –
this is the beauty of the language of Jesus as both teaching and calling.
Remembering that Jesus spoke Aramaic, while the Gospels were written in Greek,
the literal Aramaic may go: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive those in debt
to us,” but the broader sense of Jesus’ prayer may be something like: “Untie
the tangled threads of destiny that bind us, as we release others from the
entanglements of past mistakes.”[1]7
Here we may gain a glimpse into the Middle Eastern culture of fate and
destiny, brutally coupled with the rapacious extortion and economic inequities
of Roman imperial occupation. Now, I do not want to make inaccurate
analogies between the social circumstances of Jesus’ day and ours because there
are in fact differences, but for Christians the social message of Jesus is not
optional, especially as it deals with economic justice. To quote Grisham
again: “Jesus preached more and taught more about helping the poor and the sick
and the hungry than he did about heaven and hell. Shouldn’t that tell us
something?”
Allow me an anecdotal litany of obscenities:
- the UN is reporting that
as a result of the increased costs of food so far this year, 20,000 more people
a day fall ill or die of hunger-related causes;
- according to the New York
Times, Norwegian cod caught in their costal waters is sent to China by air
cargo where it is filleted and packaged in order to be sent back to Norway for
sale;
- over the course of the
past nine months 400 people made homeless by the sub-prime mortgage collapse
set up a tent city next to the municipal airport in Orange County, CA; last
month the city began evicting all but those who can prove they are Orange
County residents;
- from the NY Times again,
on April 14th, quote: “Sometime between the government bailout
of Bear Stearns and the
Bureau of Labor Statistics report that America lost 80,000 jobs in March,
Lee Tachman spent roughly $50,000 last month on a four-day jaunt to Miami for
himself and three close friends.”
- So far this year there
have been food riots in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania,
Senegal, Yemen, Egypt, Haiti;
- In 2006 more than a third
of the entire US maize crop went to ethanol for fuel, a 48% increase on
2005.
- Between January
1st and March 31st of this year Exxon-Mobil’s profits
totaled 12 billion dollars; Shell’s profits increased by 25% to 9.08 billion
dollars, and British-Petroleum’s profits increased 63% earning 7.62 billion
dollars in three months.
“Untie the tangled threads of destiny that bind us, as we release
others from the entanglements of past mistakes.” But what if the mistakes
are the results of avarice (e.g., the sub-prime mortgage industry) or the
legitimate desires of farmers to make long overdue money (e.g., growing food
for fuel)? Can we forgive the super-rich and powerful their greed and
ignorance? Can we forgive them their debts, while so many of the poor are
not forgiven theirs?
The Buddhists teach we must have compassion for even the super-rich because
their attachment to things is the result of ignorant desires for the illusion
of permanence in materiality. Desire perpetuates the karmic cycle of
rebirth; only insight into the interconnectedness of all things can begin to
liberate one from such desires, transforming greed into compassion for the
suffering all around us.
In Islam the wealthy are enjoined to care for the poor, period. The
requirement to practice zakat, “charity” is not an option.
Indeed, as I recently learned the root for the Arabic term zakat means
“purification.” One is to purify his or her wealth by being charitable,
by obeying God and following the Prophet Muhammad’s example of insuring that
the community of believers cared for those who were poor among them.
What are Christians to do then? We all know of the injunctions of Paul
to the early Christian congregations to stop their whining about who was more
important than whom and to take care of the poor, the widows and orphans among
them. Christians have an unequivocal right to critique one another about
economic and social justice; especially, here in a land of privilege. One
hundred years ago, Walter Raushenbush’s most important and influential book was
published, “Christianity and the Social Crisis.” Speaking of the problems
in his day we hear, unfortunately, something still familiar to us on our
day. He wrote: “We hear passionate protests against the use of the
hateful word “class” in America. There are no classes in our country, we
are told. But the hateful part is not the word, but the thing. If
class distinctions are growing up here, he serves his country ill who would
hush up the fact or blind the people to it by fine phrases.”[2] I have come to the
conviction that the evidence is in, here and now: the economic system initiated
25 to 30 years ago in our nation has neither trickled-down nor pulled-up those
who needed it most, rather the opposite. Call it neo-liberal economics or
neo-conservative politics, the “end of welfare as we know it” or “compassionate
conservatism” – what our nation has created, and now much of the rest of the
world has joined, is predatory; it is neither just nor equitable and its
environmental consequences are coming home to roost, and fast. Very few
are talking about the morality of wealth; equity and justice are non-factors at
the levels of power, both governmental and corporate. Instead we get what
amounts to a return to the sale of indulgences in the form of “carbon off-set
trading,” making pollution a commodity. And just this morning I
heard about a venture capitalist in Baghdad, pitching a skateboard park, say
this to the Iraqi’s he was pitching to: “I’m a business man. I’m not here
because I think you are nice people; I think there’s money to be made
here.”
In the words of the British guerilla, graffiti artist known as Banksy: “… if
you just value money, then your opinion is worthless.”
So, again I ask; what’s a Christian to do? It doesn’t matter if his
name is George, Bill or George; if they claim Christ they must be spoken to and
even against by other Christians for the sake of the suffering, for those who
take hope from the Beatitudes. This is a plea for reformation.
But, I hear you in your minds: “I have no influence over the President of a
nation any more than I do over the CEO of Exxon.” But you do have
influence here. Somewhere on this campus there is a young person smart
enough to make the internal combustion engine obsolete and an alternative,
viable. Somewhere on this campus there is an older person learnéd
enough and just-minded enough to envision a better economy. Somewhere on
this campus is someone passionate enough and wise enough to lead her peers
through a new enlightenment. They are here and the resources are
available, as they are on every élite campus in this nation. It’s not
that they are not here nor there, the matter is: do we have the discernment to
see them, the heart to value them, and the courage to inspire them? To
not do so is to ignore the cancelation of your own spiritual
debt, to reject grace. For any human with a heart for love, but
especially for a Christian, hopelessness is not an option. Amen.
[2] Rauschenbush,
Christianity and the Social Crisis, (Macmillan, 1907), p. 250.
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