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Christmastime is Here: Intermission

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

I’ll be continuing my series on Christmas, consumerism, and social justice in a few days – I’m still a Ph.D student and it’s finals week, so I’ve dropped the ball on this a bit – but I wanted to highlight this excellent blog entry from a WordPress user named dritta called “Stand Up for ‘Christmas’?”. (Just a warning: For those who are averse to strong language, the original post has a bit of it):

The last time I checked, spending lots of money at christmas wasn’t a big priority of Christ. Neither was all of the hoohaw about saying/doing/looking holy from the “religious” people in his day. Christ cared a lot about the oppressed, poor, neglected, and rejected. He didn’t give a %^&* what the most religious people of the day said was important; in fact, he called them a bunch of hypocrites (and got killed for it). [ . . . ]

You know what offends me? It’s not whether someone says “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas”. It’s when I read that L.L. Bean, Pier 1, and Walmart are known to be actively and intentionally using slave labor in their products. I don’t give a $%^& how many “Merry Christmas” signs they have in their store, as if that makes one flying $%^&’s worth of difference when they are participating in the enslavement of women, men, and children who are created in the image of God. Focus on the Family gives them 12-14% offensive ratings, and 52-71% friendly ratings. No mention of child slavery. No mention of beating or firing workers trying to unionize to protect themselves. No mention of the workers who have died at the factory making the cheap furniture you bought at Ikea. How does “Standing for Christmas” have ANYTHING to do with Christ?

The entire entry’s worth a read.

I’ll be posting another entry in my series on Christmas in the next few days or so.

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Posted in Economic Justice, Human Rights, Religious Right | 1 Comment »

Christmastime is Here, Part III: O Come, O Come Emmanuel

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

This is Part III of a reflecting on Christmas, consumerism, religion, politics, and Kingdom economics.
Part I: Black Friday
Part II: Who Gets the Gift?

One of the things that frustrates me most about this time of year – particularly as I’ve been getting more and more into liturgy (having grown up in mostly non-liturgical churches) – is that we call everything between the day after Thanksgiving and December 25 “the Christmas season.” The lights go up, the Santas appear at the malls, everything’s red and green, and immediately it’s Happy Time!

What’s lost, of course, is that liturgically, the Christmas season starts on December 25 (and ends with the Feast of Epiphany on January 5). The time before Christmas, as we all know from having opened the little doors on the calendars, is Advent.

What we lose, though, isn’t just a liturgical season; it’s an entire frame of mind. Christmas is a time of victory, of exuberant celebration – the Christ has come into the world! It’s no wonder the corporate interests want to advertise this, because it gives them another opportunity to say “spend spend spend!”

Advent, though, is about longing. It’s about hope. It’s about the achings of a people who’ve lived under foreign occupation and foreign oppression for half a millennium, who’ve struggled to maintain their identity and their homeland against all odds, who are just waiting for something good to happen for once.

It’s about a people disappointed in leaders like the Hasmonean Dynasty, who had led a successful revolt against the Greek occupiers in the second century BCE, only to descend into civil war and ultimately sell out to the Romans in exchange for a secure throne and a gravy train. (King Herod was one of their descendants.)

It’s about a people who are proud of who they are but unsure about how that’s supposed to work in a rapidly-changing world, a people suffering under oppression and occupation by an army that only barely tolerates their culture.

Mostly, though, it’s about a people who are waiting, hoping, praying for a Messiah to rise up and inaugurate the Kingdom, a new David to reunite Israel, right all wrongs, throw off the oppressors (both the Romans and the puppet leaders they’d set up among the Israelites) and return Israel to its rightful glory.

What we lose when we ignore Advent is the longing and waiting: the sense that the world isn’t what it’s supposed to be, that there are oppressors. When we skip to Christmas, we get caught up in the celebration, and forget exactly what it is we’re celebrating. Advent gives us an opportunity to look for the oppression in the world and stand alongside the oppressed and occupied, to feel their pain and tell them to keep holding out hope.

Perhaps more importantly, Advent gives us the opportunity to examine ourselves: Are we standing with the Israelites of the first century, oppressed, hungry, and waiting and longing for the Messiah? Or are we standing with those who are oppressing them? Who are the oppressed in the world today, and who are their oppressors? And what can we do, as citizens of the most powerful nation in the world, to stand with the former and against the latter? We ask ourselves about what we consume, about the costs of that consumption, about the arrangements our nation makes in our names in order to uphold our lifestyles.

No wonder the corporations want to skip it.

But the message of Advent is ultimately hope. The verses of the quintessential Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” are all about longing and suffering, but the chorus rings the point of Advent:

Rejoice, rejoice; Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Stay tuned for Part IV, where the rubber meets the road.

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Posted in Human Rights, Peace Concerns | 1 Comment »

Christmastime is Here, Part II: Who Gets the Gift?

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

This is Part II of a ???-part series reflecting on Christmas, consumerism, religion, politics, and Kingdom economics. Click here to read Part I: Black Friday.

Yesterday I reflected a little bit on Black Friday and the irony that is celebrating the birth of a humble Savior by engaging in orgies of consumption and stress that only make the rich richer and the poor poorer. My basic question was this:

Shouldn’t Christian believers – those who take the story of the Advent and Christ’s birth to heart – be offering another way? When the world is crying out for justice and compassion, isn’t God calling us to sacrifice of ourselves to make this happen?

So today, I think I’m going to get down to brass tacks: What’s the alternative? What can we as Christians do during the Christmas season to offer a true witness to the one who fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty, as Mary sings in the Magnificat?

I’m going to suggest here that we, as American Christians, need to seriously rethink what we’re doing during the Christmas season. The metaphor I’d like to play around with today is this: If Christmas is a celebration of the birthday of Jesus Christ, shouldn’t He be getting all the presents?

No, I’m not talking about taking all the money you’d spend on gifts this year and giving them to your local church – though if that’s where you feel led, go do so and be blessed. But for the rest of us, we have to ask ourselves: if we can’t literally give of our material gifts to Christ Himself, shouldn’t we give them to the people Christ identifies with? The Gospels make it clear who Christ declares to be His chief concern during His life on earth: the poor, the meek, the oppressed, the outsiders, the peacemakers, the widows and orphans and foreigners in our midst.

Note, if you will, who’s absent from that list, who receives (directly or indirectly) Christ’s proclamations of woe: the rich, the “high priests” (whether religious or political), the money-changers, the oppressive and occupying Roman authorities. When the rich young ruler comes to Jesus, He tells him to sell everything he owns, because it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom.

So I think we should be asking this question: Who’s getting gifts from us this year? Of course we’d answer, “Well, my friends and family are, obviously.” Sure, but who else? I had to buy that sweater or that Blu-Ray player or that iPod somewhere – who got the money? Was it the miner who mined the raw material, or the worker who put it together in the factory, or the trucker who drove it across the country, or the person in the retail uniform who rung it up for me?

And if it wasn’t these people – the people who actually did the work to get what I bought into my hands and into the wrapping paper – then who did get my gift?

Do we as Christians have a responsibility to ensure that we only patronize businesses and companies that pay their workers a fair wage, that give their workers ample time off in order to have lives outside of work, that have basic safety standards? Do we have a responsibility as Christians to look for the union label, to inform ourselves about the business practices of the companies we buy from, to look at reports on things like CEO pay and corporate governance and factory conditions and outsourcing?

Further (and I don’t know if I can make a theological case for this), do we as American Christians have some kind of responsibility – call it patriotic, call it looking out for your neighbor, whatever – to make an effort to buy from companies that pay American workers a fair wage?

And finally, returning back to the metaphor we started with here: If, on the celebration of Jesus Christ’s birthday, we’re going to give our presents to the people He identifies with, should we as Christians be buying more stuff for ourselves and one another at all?

More questions, fewer answers. We’ll continue tomorrow or Monday.

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Posted in Economic Justice, Human Rights | 7 Comments »

Christmastime is Here, Part I: Black Friday

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Okay, so for those of us who follow the liturgical calendar, Christmastime technically isn’t here yet – we’re in the season of Advent. I’ll probably write more on that later on… maybe on Sunday or Monday, after Advent has officially started.

But to the retailers, this is the beginning of the Christmas season: Black Friday – a rather appropriate name, if unintentionally so. As I drove back from a lovely Thanksgiving meal with friends last night at midnight or so, we saw people already lined up outside the Target and Best Buy in my neighborhood, just waiting for the stores to open at 5am so they could get the deeply-discounted flat-screen TVs and all those other wonderful “door-buster” deals the retailers were offering.

And I couldn’t help but have a thought that’s recurred in my head for the past five years or so around this time of year: How far we’ve come from the Son of God being born in a humble manger, one of an oppressed people in an occupied and war-torn country.

How far we’ve come from Mary’s words in the Magnificat, with the Christ child growing in her womb:

[God] has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.

Look outside at Black Friday – at people trampling one another to save a hundred bucks on a plasma TV, at angry faces behind steering wheels in mall parking lots as they try to find space, at the insane amounts of money working its way from regular folks’ Visa cards up to fat-cat CEOs while they lay off American workers and hire more children in the 2/3-World to work for a buck a day in unsafe factories. Look outside at the orgy of consumption, while it’s almost certain that within a mile of these big-box retailers is a homeless family trying to keep warm another night in their car.

Is this how we celebrate a Savior born into the least majestic of conditions? Is this how we celebrate the humble being lifted up? Is this how we celebrate the hungry being filled with good things, the rich being sent away empty?

Perhaps more to the point: Shouldn’t Christian believers – those who take the story of the Advent and Christ’s birth to heart – be offering another way? When the world is crying out for justice and compassion, isn’t God calling us to sacrifice of ourselves to make this happen?

I’ll be continuing this series probably tomorrow, with some reflections on how we might be more just and compassionate during this holiday season.

(Oh, for those who were wondering where the title came from, it’s from perhaps the greatest Christmas movie ever made.)

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Posted in Economic Justice, Human Rights | 3 Comments »

Pray for Health Care Reform

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Our nation’s health care system is broken – and our people are suffering daily because of this grave injustice in the richest nation on the planet.

Millions of our fellow citizens are suffering right now because they don’t have health insurance. If they’re fortunate enough to be healthy right now, they worry about what would happen to them if they all of a sudden became sick, or were injured, and had to pay the exorbitant prices charged by doctors and hospitals to the uninsured.

Those who are fortunate enough to have insurance are also worried – because our system rewards cost-cutting measures for insurance companies like finding any imaginable excuse to not cover people when they get sick. It’s our nation’s dirty little secret that many of those who went bankrupt due to medical costs had insurance when they got sick – and their insurance company did whatever they could to get out of paying for treatment. Those who have insurance are worried because they could lose their jobs and have no insurance at all.

Given the millions of people suffering in this country from our nation’s completely broken health-care system – a system that rewards greed and venality instead of good care and compassion – why are we Christians not using the tools we have at our disposal to change the system?

In other words – why aren’t we praying for health care reform?

As Christians, we hold as one of our beliefs the idea that prayer does something. Whether or not we theologically believe in a God who changes God’s mind due to the prayers of the people, we can’t escape that Scripture calls us to bring our petitions and concerns before God – including (in 1 Timothy 2:2) for those in positions of authority. We are supposed to bring the concerns of our nation – not just our own private fears and thoughts – before God.

And it’s quite clear, given the tenor of the debate in Washington over the issue, that some hearts need to be changed. We need God to quicken some of the hearts of our Representatives and Senators so that they care more about the people they’ve been elected to serve than they do about the profits of the health insurance industry. We need God to call those who do favor strong reform to speak out with a prophetic voice in calling their fellow members to the cause. We need God to energize the hearts of more of the people to call, and write, and advocate for real, serious health care reform. In short – like every other great struggle for progress in our nation’s history – we need God’s help to make it happen.

Perhaps, in addition to calling and writing letters to our representatives in Congress, in addition to writing letters to the editor of our local papers, in addition to talking to our neighbors about the necessity for health care reform, we should be organizing to petition God for health care reform. We should be asking for the microphone when it’s passed around during the “Prayers of the People” and calling our brothers and sisters to beseech God to change hearts as necessary. We should be making health care reform part of our own prayers, part of the prayers of our small groups, part of the prayers of our Sunday schools.

Prayer is no substitute for action, but we as Christians believe that prayer and action are a much more potent force when brought together.

Won’t you join me in praying for health care reform?

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Posted in Christian Community, Health Care, Human Rights | 16 Comments »

Who has the microphone?

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

microphone

In this season of debate about US health care reform, Broadstreet Ministry in Center City Philadelphia recently hosted a health care town hall with Congressman Joe Sestak.  Rev. Bill Golderer, convening minister, began the event by directing the attention of community members and media gathered to the bright origami swallows hanging in the rafters of the sanctuary.  Each piece of paper contained a prayer or lament from someone in the community. We were asked to hold the weight of the prayers hanging above us in our awareness during the dialogue.

This invitation is an important one for communities of faith to hold forth as the health care debate resumes following the August recess.  Now is the time we must ask: whose voices are given priority in our dialogue?  What are the prayers of the community that have seemed to be ignored or unheard?  There are nine million uninsured children in the United States who are not filling our headlines with their shouts at town halls, though their lack of access to quality health care deserves such indignance.

Further, now is the time for communities of faith to critically confront the structures that lead to significant disparities in access to quality health care based upon a child’s racial-ethnic identity.  As Children’s Defense founder Marian Wright Edelman has spelled out, “minority children are uninsured and underinsured at far greater rates than White children. One in 13 White children is uninsured, compared to one in five Latino children, one in five American Indian children, one in eight Black children, and one in nine Asian/Pacific Islander children.” (find column attached below)

Now is the time for communities of faith to pass the mic to those too often ignored or unheard by our legislators.

In your community, who is holding the microphone, and who is going unheard?

Laura Markle Downton
Princeton Theological Seminary

http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/marian-wright-edelman-child-watch-column/unfair-childrens-health-disparities.html

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Posted in Economic Justice, Health Care, Human Rights, Race Relations | No Comments »

EPA’s pledge to environmental justice: a start for health care.

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Healthcare goes beyond governmental coverage.  Over the past few weeks of our discussions about the healthcare issue, it has strengthened my perspective to look at it through the eyes of Matthew 25.  So, thank you!

Similar to the obligation our country has to insure healthcare for its people, we the people have a moral obligation to care for the health of ourselves and our neighbors.  What responsibilities does this commitment hold us accountable for? We can look at this answer through many different lenses: social, religious, economical. But as I read environmental news every day I see more and more how related our environmental stewardship and healthcare are.  Lisa Jackson, who President Obama elected to head the EPA, recently reports about environmental justice and EPA’s pledge to renew it for minorities. It is fact that minorities and low-income people are victims of more pollution and riskier environmental degradation. Extensive exposures to pollutants cause these groups to fall ill with diseases like asthma and cancer and are a real threat to their health.  Every day there are reports about exposures to lead in neighborhoods where owners are too poor to replace paint, old pipes and other sources of the contaminant. Liver disease is linked to pollutants such as pesticides and heavy metals in our water and air. We are all held accountable for these pollutants; they are not exclusively generated within the boundaries of these neighborhoods but are carried universally from each emitter. What are we subjecting ourselves to?

Additionally, businesses that could provide jobs are leaving these areas of town.  Companies like coal plants and similar polluting manufacturers are coming into these neighborhoods where land is not as valuable. This challenges minorities’ quality of life and jeopardizes their healthcare. Chris Foreman, who is professor at University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, expressed threats to minorities’ neighborhoods that include filth, odors, dust, noise, congestion, and the absence of recreational and park facilities.

These neighborhoods are truly “the least of these.” This is our obligation as Matthew 25 believers. Jackson encourages, “we have to go to every community and show them that the issues of environmental protection are their issues and that our world is their world. That’s how we bring every voice to this discussion. That’s how we bring real change.” Environmental stewardship is where health care, true care for the health of our neighbors, begins.

Posted in Environmental Stewardship, Health Care, Human Rights, Race Relations | No Comments »

So…what do YOU think?

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

Congress says it might have a healthcare package by August.  Obama has made it a top priority since his days on the campaign trail. The health industry seems to be “open” to a healthcare package, even if reluctantly. 

So, where does your faith inform you on this issue?

So, my challenge to you this week is: 

1) what is the “issue”? does it matter that the US doesn’t have a healthcare system? who is most affected by the current healthcare industry in the US?  how do we compare to other systems, financially, but most importantly MORALLY?

2) what’s your Scripture? what are the Scriptures that you feel most powerfully sustain not so much your “argument”, but your “convictions” regarding this issue?

3) what’s another source? who is the theologian, philosopher, political scientist that deeply affects your view on this issue? 

and lastly…

4) should the church care? should people of faith care? why?

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Posted in Christian Community, Economic Justice, Environmental Stewardship, Health Care, Human Rights | 6 Comments »

A follow-up on Healthcare, Government, and Faith

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

This is a follow-up to Bill who submitted a great comment. He asked two main questions and then fleshed out a great argument:

1) Just where does God call us to support the Government in the role of care giver?

2) Just what is your faith in? Faith has an object or it is useless. I contend that your “faith” is in a system and not the person of Jesus Christ. (find the whole conversation here.

Below, is my response:

Bill–

You bring up a great point, and one that I’ve struggled with–as Christians, as people of faith, what role should the Government play in the United States?

We have Christian libertarians and anarchists, who simply believe that Government cannot be reconciled with the Kingdom of God, therefore, there should be no Government Christians recognize or Government’s role should be very limited.

We have Christian socialists and marxists who believe that Government is a “social contract” with the people and thus, people of faith should apply kingdom principles as it comes to helping people that are impoverished, homeless, sick, imprisoned, oppressed, etc, etc.

I would say there are many more “models” of Christians living under different types of government, but would offer one more which I think is particularly relevant to the US. This is what I would call “enlightenment” Christians, where the public sphere and faith are separated (coming out of the “Age of Reason/Enlightenment). So Government plays a role, but it is distinct from and perhaps at times at odds with, the Christian faith, but it is our reason, nonetheless that must navigate a fallen world in hopes of governing as best we can.

I take all these models seriously because I think to follow Jesus Christ isn’t something that remains private or personal, but actually has worldwide implications. Christ’s proclamation of a Kingdom where the “last shall be first and the first last,” where what we do for “the least of these, you did unto me,” is a completely different form of ordering, of government than humanity has ever been able to fashion.

So, the person who thinks we can bring a utopia here on earth by the strength and power of our own making isn’t taking seriously the power dynamics at play when people relate to one another.

But I also cannot read the Exodus story, where spiritual emancipation from Egypt is also a socioeconomic and political one, or the Pentateuch, Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, the Gospels, Acts, James (and the list goes on) and not believe that the Christian faith has economic, political, social, and spiritual consequences.

Reading these stories, I see the work of a God who is intimately involved in our story, and is angered by the way we oppress the Triad of the poor (in Scripture this “triad” is composed of the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner as seen in Deut. 26:12).

So where does that leave people of faith?

I don’t think the Government can become the kind of caretaker that God calls Christians to be. I don’t think that Government can ever, by its own designs, become the Kingdom of God. But we do have a responsibility, in the here and now, to care for people. And we must decide, is Government one way, of many, to meet the present needs?

I would love the day when the media reports: “Government’s Medicare program has become obsolete because every church, all people of faith, are caring for the needs of the elderly, the sick, disabled, and those who cannot afford medicine.”

So I encourage you to continue the work, by the power of the Spirit, to help those whom God calls us to help. And I hope we can call on communities of faith to fulfill this need, and as we do that, I would also call on the Government, who claims to represent our interests, to make healthcare more accessible, even for the people in society that we often ignore.

It isn’t a faith in a system at all, as that wouldn’t be faith. It is actually a faithful response to the love of God witnessed in Jesus Christ. In that sense, it is a joyful faith in the impossible. God, Thy Kingdom Come.

*(note: some helpful theologians in this area might be H. Richard Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Ada-Maria Isasi-Diaz, Gregory Boyd, and yes, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Oscar Romero. It is not what they are labeled as much as it is what they are actually saying, and how they back it up with Scripture).

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Posted in Christian Community, Economic Justice, Health Care, Human Rights, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

On this Mother’s Day…

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

…let us remember particularly the mothers who grieve – for sons and daughters lost to our never-ending cycle of war and violence; to grinding poverty, hunger, and malnutrition; to preventable diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria. Jesus Christ promises in the Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.

That is not just a beautiful promise – though it is that – but, I think, it can also be read as a charge to Jesus’s followers. Let us be the (partial) fulfillment of the promise of Jesus, and commit ourselves to comforting the mothers – and the fathers, and the brothers and sisters, and the sons and daughters – whom Jesus joins in mourning for the victims of the injustices of this world.

And let us commit ourselves to the long, hard, impossible-without-God task of working to end these injustices, so that fewer mothers mourn in the future.

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Posted in Economic Justice, Human Rights, Peace Concerns | No Comments »

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