Posts Tagged ‘Advent’

Christmastime is Here, Part IV: No More Charity

Friday, December 25th, 2009

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.

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Posted in Economic Justice | 4 Comments »

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 »