This is Part IV of a series reflecting on Christmas, consumerism, religion, politics, and Kingdom economics.
Part I: Black Friday
Part II: Who Gets the Gift?
Part III: O Come, O Come Emmanuel
Okay, so I promised the fourth installment a week ago, and didn’t ever get around to writing it. Sometimes life catches up with you; I apologize to all who were waiting with bated breath. But I think this delay can be good; I promised that the rubber would meet the road in this installment, and I don’t intend to disappoint. But we can let our “Christmas spirit” get so wrapped up in Christmas that we forget that it’s something we should be cultivating year-round, and maybe continuing this conversation through the twelve days of Christmas could counteract that to an extent.
One of the old practices of Christmas – and one that I think we in America particularly feel the loss of – is the tradition of wassailing, when the poor of the community would go to the houses of the rich, sing carols, and ask for the rich to share their food and drink in exchange for a blessing. The more I dig into the tradition in my mind, the more I think that covered up in there, in the schmaltz of Christmastime, is a powerfully prophetic practice.
To put it quite bluntly, I think it’s time that Christians start standing up, speaking in the name of Jesus Christ, and making some demands of the rich. And as a good rhetorician, I think it starts with the words we use. In short – I think we need to banish the word “charity” from our vocabulary.
God says throughout the books of the Old Testament prophets that it is an injustice to live in luxury while the poor starve. God says throughout the books of the Old Testament prophets that it is an injustice not to use the power one has been given to help the oppressed, the widowed, the orphaned, the foreigner. One of the most insidious lies of the moneyed class has been rebranding what should properly be called justice, as charity.
The difference, I think, is in the obligation. Charity is something extra one does if one has some money left over that one doesn’t need. Charitable giving isn’t expected to cut into one’s lifestyle in any way. If you have the choice between living more simply and giving your excess income to the poor, or living a lavish lifestyle, the frame of charity makes the latter an acceptable choice.
Justice does not. Justice is an obligation. If you are not practicing justice, you are taking part in injustice. If your holding on to your money or your using your power for your own gain are a source of injustice, it is a moral wrong to continue to use them thus. Charity leaves the status quo intact and skims a little off the top; justice demands a radical redistribution of wealth from rich to poor.
That’s a loaded phrase, so let me explain. I think we can differ in whether or not we believe that government should do the redistributing of wealth, but I don’t think there’s any ambiguity in Scripture about the fact that redistribution of wealth is a demand from God. If our neighbor is poor – and in our interconnected world, every single human being on the face of the planet is our neighbor – God demands that if we have the means, we use them to help our neighbor. As Christians, following the example of Christ who gave all, this demand comes even at the cost of our own well-being.
I’ll be even more plain about it: If we American Christians were doing our job, we wouldn’t be having a debate about a public health care option, about how much foreign aid to issue, about what to do about poverty in our nation. We wouldn’t have a homelessness problem or a joblessness problem. We have the wealth and the power to solve all of these problems. Our problem isn’t means – it’s the will to do it.
Is this a hard teaching? Undoubtedly. It challenges me every day as I go to the office, as I eat my meals, as I sit in my warm home. And I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t do nearly as much as I should. I should be cutting back on luxuries to ensure that others have necessities. But I don’t, because as Paul writes, knowing what I should do and actually doing it are two different things.
It’s an insidious lie of the moneyed class – and one that’s unfortunately found a great deal of purchase in the soil of American culture – that those who are poor deserve to be, that if they’d just work harder or get the right attitude or be better people they’d be middle-class too. Let me be emphatic: That is in no way a Christian value. The Christian value toward poverty is simply this: “There but for the grace of God go I.”
All I have is from God. It was God who caused me to be born into a middle-class home in suburbia; God who gave me the gifts of intelligence and the opportunities to make the most of that intelligence through education; God who’s given me a healthy body; God who put me in a place where I could take advantage of those opportunities and have a stable job that provides for my needs. It’s a fallacy for any of us to pretend that we’ve pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps; it’s God who put us where we are. All the hard work we’ve done to get to where we are, we’ve been able to do because God has given us the means and abilities we need to do it.
But God demands that we use these things God has given us not for our own gain, but for others – for the sake of justice. God has given to us the ability and the riches, that we might redistribute these riches for the sake of the Kingdom. This requires an attitude that’s 180 degrees from the “traditional American values” of acquisitiveness and selfishness, of poverty as a sign of moral failure – values that have, unfortunately, been promulgated and propagated by the church as well as society as a whole.
And the change in attitude starts with a change in vocabulary. So no more charity. Let us banish that word from our vocabulary. Giving to the poor, fighting oppression and disease, opening our churches and homes to those who need a warm place isn’t an act of charity. It isn’t optional. It is nothing less than a demand from God on those who have the means. It is a matter of justice – and if we’re not doing everything we can, we’re doing injustice.
Let’s go wassailing.
Let me start by saying I agree with the spiritual viewpoint of this statement. However, have you considered what the economic and political repercussions would be if everyone in the US actually practiced the type of ascetic lifestyle you propose? For example, how would the economy react to such a drastic loss of working capital? Or, how would the labor pool be affected if working or not working made no appreciable difference to your standard of living? I don’t pose this line of questioning as a rebuttal to your post, just wondering about the practical outcomes.
I don’t know… but I do know that the American lifestyle is killing laborers both here and abroad, killing our moral vision of the universe, and killing our planet. The way we’re living can’t be sustained, and far too much of humanity’s energy is being spent trying to sustain it – to do the impossible.
Be careful that you do not fall into the “if they won’t give it, tax it” crowd. That’s getting dangerously close to coveting. The true spirit of wassailing was calling on the charity of the wealthy with gentle reminders, not demanding their wealth be shared. Where the system falls apart is that the Holy Spirit is no longer a factor because we have made him irrelevant to all not just the wealthy. When that happens, the main cry is to implement laws or, worse, justify stealing (as a now famous abby minister suggested). What we should be doing is working to bring the wealthy into the kingdom of God where His Holy Spirit can once again convict them of His commands to provide for the poor. Otherwise the demands of the wassailers is seen as greedy and covetous by the wealthy because the Holy Spirit is not involved. Don’t get me wrong, coveting goes both ways, but taxing, demanding and stealing are not going to change the hearts of the wealthy. That takes love.
Why should a demand for justice – clearly laid out at many points in the Bible – be seen as coveting? Coveting is wanting what someone has for oneself; what I’m talking about is God’s demand that those who have more than they need ensure the well-being of those who lack the basic necessities of life. I’m doing okay financially (though I’m not well-off by any means); I’m simply relaying God’s demand that those who are rich redistribute their wealth.
Quite frankly, “bringing the wealthy into the Kingdom of God” seems to have resulted more often than not in the messengers of that Kingdom tailoring God’s message to suit that audience, or ignoring it entirely in favor of a version of the Gospel that doesn’t demand economic justice. Jesus had the right idea when He talked to the rich young ruler: Give all you have to the poor and only then can you follow Me. Sacrifice precedes discipleship; as we’ve seen the corrupting influence of wealth on the Church, that’s really the only way the equation can work.
Love demands as well as comforts; the love of God assures the wealthy that God will take care of them as God takes care of the birds of the field, while at the same time demanding of them that they radically sacrifice for the well-being of those around them. Quite frankly, I pray more that the Holy Spirit come on the Church than on the wealthy – though certainly both are desirable – that the Church might drop its heretical fetishization of wealth and its sinful acceptance and reinforcement of the unjust consumer-capitalist status quo, and speak prophetically against the wealthy, against the powerful, and for the common person.