Chesterton explains the robbery of poor Greece by the rich…

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Chesterton, poverty, robbery

To-day the rich man knows in his heart that he is a cancer and not an organ of the State. He differs from all other thieves or parasites for this reason: that the brigand who takes by force wishes his victims to be rich. But he who wins by a one-sided contract actually wishes them to be poor. Rob Roy in a cavern, hearing a company approaching, will hope (or if in a pious mood, pray) that they may come laden with gold or goods. But Mr. Rockefeller, in his factory, knows that if those who pass are laden with goods they will pass on. He will therefore (if in a pious mood) pray that they may be destitute, and so be forced to work his factory for him for a starvation wage. It is said (and also, I believe, disputed) that Blücher riding through the richer parts of London exclaimed, “What a city to sack!” But Blücher was a soldier if he was a bandit. The true sweater feels quite otherwise. It is when he drives through the poorest parts of London that he finds the streets paved with gold, being paved with prostrate servants; it is when he sees the grey lean leagues of Bow and Poplar that his soul is uplifted and he knows he is secure. This is not rhetoric, but economics.

G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (1922) [link to source on archive.org]

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Theological Reflection on “Mission in the Context of Empire”

I have been selected to represent the PCANZ in the Council for World Mission programme “Face the Facts”, 2014 to be held in the Philippines. More information about the programme can be found here: Face the Facts 2014: Call for applications. To get a sense of what this is about, see the Face the Facts 2013 video.

Below is my application essay for the programme. It’s a reflection on the CWM document “Mission in the Context of Empire“.

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Application Essay: Theological Reflection on “Mission in the Context of Empire”

Christians and the world they live in are groaning under the legacy of empires, old and new (Romans 8:22-23). In naming our mission context as ‘Empire’ the Trustees of CWM took a bold step, especially since they acknowledge that the pervasive and hegemonic nature of contemporary Empire makes it hard to see for some, especially Western Christians and other elites who are the direct or indirect beneficiaries of this Empire.

What is this Empire? Who does it benefit? Contemporary ‘Empire’ does not easily attract an adjective, such as ‘Roman’ or ‘American’ Empire. Indeed, “Mission in the Context of Empire” (MCE) does not seek to blame the West or even global capitalism, perhaps thinking that such things are too narrow targets for understanding Empire in today’s world. But perhaps not. Western ways of thinking since the Enlightenment have been rightly blamed for the rise of concentrated political and economic power that subjected the world to European empires from the 15th century onward.

Capitalism, which gets only one mention in MCE, would seem to bear much blame today for the devastating consequences of the economic domination of both political and environmental spheres. In the context of contemporary Empire, it may be time for the churches to declare that the theological justification of capitalism is a heresy. As the Accra Confession states, “the integrity of our faith is at stake if we remain silent or refuse to act in the face of the current system of neoliberal economic globalization.” Remaining silent about capitalism’s negative effects risks giving it tacit support. Actively supporting capitalism theologically could be named a heresy for several reasons:

• It has a false anthropology distorting the image of God, positing humans as driven by competition rather than cooperation
• It has led to inequalities which have divided the Body of Christ
• It has plundered the Earth and seen creation a storehouse of exploitable resources, rather than seeing it as a source of God-given life.
• It turns human work into the pursuit of profit, rather the glorification of God
• It reduces human life to work, production, and consumption

Too often Empire has sought and encouraged theological support for those socio-political systems that defeated the previous economic and political systems and have become the newest status quo. An example was theology that served western democracy and liberalism in opposition to the ideologies of Fascism and State Socialism in the early to mid-twentieth century. Western theologies that promote or defend these theologies as universalistic have become essentially imperialistic in supporting democratic and liberalism capitalism around the globe.

The churches’ legitimate cold-war concern that the individual would be absorbed into the mass communist state has now been replaced with the promotion of the idea that the individual can find self-expression through consumption of capitalist commodities. But for many working class people capitalism has sacrificed workers, their families, and their environment to the ideology of profits, growth, and other capitalist idols. The individual is not so much at risk from absorption into a mass society, but is at risk from starvation itself. In other words, we have preserved the prospect of liberal individuality at the expense of the individual. This is witnessed to in the stories about individuals striving for life under oppressive situations shored up by imperial ideas. MCE, in sharing such stories places the individual before the Empire itself. Like the famous image of the Chinese shopper facing a row of tanks, the individual faces the crushing might of empire sometimes alone, but hopefully with the support of the church.

But in addition to exposing the might of contemporary Empire, what else does the church offer against it? Before this can be understood, the church must first of all be attentive to its history of its complicity in Empire. When the early church become the established church it established an imperial theology, which now must be challenged and uprooted. In this ongoing task the Reformed Church must repent of its involvement in empire and also the persecution of other Christians, such as the Anabaptists, who rejected this imperial theology. This act of kenosis, or self-emptying of its power, by the church is one helpful way of understanding the shift to post-imperial theology.

Christians may be well aware of the worst of the church, but can we also appreciate that at its best, the church and the Christian story offers a counterpoint to contemporary Empire? MCE shows us what this best can be. One of the things the church offers in resistance to Empire is demonstrating through its life together a new vision of life in all its fullness. Rather than the concentration of power, the church believes in the distribution of power. Rather than a life devoted to economic activity (being both a producer and consumer of the products of empire), the church offers life in all its fullness. It is an irony of Empire that it promises fullness to its people in times to come, but only once economic growth trickles down to the poor. This remains a false and deceiving hope.

Yet is the good news shared by the church more than an after life free of slavery to earthly power? A gospel message that does not incarnate itself here and now will struggle to be attractive to the masses toiling in service to the powers of Empire. Nor is it faithful to a gospel that speaks of the healing and feeding acts of Jesus Christ. The Gospel speaks of traditions of new ways of living that offer life in all its fullness in this world.

Mission, as the sharing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is a task all CWM partners share as the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27). Another biblical image that might also be helpful in understanding CWM’s mission to Empire is the church as the family of God. All Christians are brothers and sisters in Christ. Like a family we are united, though divided. Just as families are sometimes split up by the need to become migrant workers yet remain family members, the church too is divided across borders and yet understands that it remains one united family.

For the Western church the understanding of mission in MCE means coming to terms with the post-Christendom world, where Christianity is not dominant and Christian cultural assumptions can no longer be assumed to be held by all the inhabitants of the nation. This requires a shift in thinking away from the notion that Christians can, or should, try to shape a Christian society through law or the state, and not export Western Christianity through the organs of the state and empire into other nations. It can be helped in this task of forming new ways of thinking through its emerging cultural status by learning from partner churches in lands where Christianity has always been a minority.

The genius of CWM and MCE is that just as we must learn about Empire from each other and the pain this causes, we can also learn about resistance from each other. What forms of Christian life together that resist Empire can we share with each other that are faithful to the cries of our brothers and sisters in Christ? In exploring these questions together CWM partner churches can begin to model new ways of doing mission together in the context of Empire.

SERMON: Fifth Sunday After Epiphany (9 February 2014)

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money, sermon

Order of service (PDF) for 9  February 2014 at St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Readings selected from those set down for the Sunday closest to Waitangi Day in the “Lectionary and Calendar, 2013-2014: Year A – Matthew” (Methodist Faith and Order Committee, 2013)

• Deuteronomy 10:12-21
• Matthew 6:19-24
• 1 Corinthians 1:26-31

SERMON

My confession this morning is that I have chosen to preach on something I barely come into contact with, and know about distantly, if at all.

My topic is – Money.

However, in these times, which values opinion over knowledge, ignorance is not something that prevents people from having and sharing their thoughts.

Here, however, we have something that the preacher needs to be especially wary of – that the balance of one’s bank account influences one’s opinion of money.

This temptation is one Kiwi writer Joy Cowley, describes well in her Psalm on this topic:

I am not sure where I am with money.
When I’ve had very little of it,
I’ve been full of theories about sharing;
but when I’ve had more than enough,
the money changer in my temple
tends to label the surplus “my” and “mine”.

With this caveat, I wish to focus this morning on Matthew chapter 6, verse 24, which in the New Revised Standard Version reads as follows:

“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

This, I’m sure is a very familiar text to you. It is also known widely outside the church, even in this age of widespread biblical illiteracy. Perhaps for the church it is too familiar; for the familiar is no longer news. This should concern us, for as the famous monk, Thomas Merton, warned: “if it is not news it is not Gospel.”

Let’s look in more detail at this familiar verse from the Gospel of Saint Matthew, especially this statement of Jesus:

“You cannot serve God and wealth.”

There is much packed into these six simple words.

To those who say the Bible is illogical or unscientific – we should observe that we have here a clear logical statement. Just as a person cannot travel North and South at the same time, one cannot simultaneously serve both God and money. Jesus does not suggest that we might not be able to serve both. Or that we may not serve both – but the emphasis is on CANNOT serve both.

A second thing to observe is Jesus’s assumption that we humans have to serve somebody. We are the slaves or servants of God or money. Servanthood is not something we can opt out off. We comfort ourselves that we are the masters, but we are not – we are servants. In his song “Gotta Serve Somebody”, Bob Dylan sings:

“Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody”

As servants we cannot master God. God never becomes our servant – God does not exist for us, serve us, and do our biding. Our prayers are not – or should not be – commandments for God to obey. If that were so then we would be god ourselves.

Rather we are to serve God. How do we serve God?

The service of God is to do what God requires of us. What this is is described in one form by the familiar verse of Micah 6:8:

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?”

This verse from the Hebrew prophet Micah is justifiably famous as a statement promoting justice. But sometimes Christians too readily throw the word ‘justice’ around as if everyone knows what it means.

Doing justice has become a slogan with the assumption that everyone knows what justice is and what it demands of us, the church, and the government. Too often “doing justice” makes us avoid the difficult task of thinking through what God’s justice would look like in a particular situation.

With this in mind let’s return to our text from Deuteronomy, which also guides us to know what God requires of us, while helping us flesh out what justice demands. The text begins with the simple yet profound question:

“What does the LORD your God require of you?”

And it proceeds to answer in this way, possibly offering a more complete guide on what God requires:

“Only to fear the LORD your God,
to walk in all his ways, to love him,
to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul,
and to keep the commandments of the LORD your God and his decrees”

Later in the reading we hear that God’s justice means care for the widow and orphan, loving the stranger by providing them with food and clothing.

That is what the service of God looks like.

But what does the service of money look like?

Some of you might be surprised to learn that money is a master at all. You might say –

“hold on a minute, isn’t money something we master? Isn’t money a servant of humanity, being a useful tool for trade in the marketplace? Isn’t money something we earn, save, and spend as we will. It’s ours to dominate, right?”

Such a response is a common cultural assumption. A major NZ bank, for example, has the slogan “Be good with money”, suggesting that we are, or could be, in control of money. The bank and its helpful staff can help us save, borrow, and spend money. Money is to be managed, and something that we manage we are surely the master of. Right?

But consider how this notion becomes a system of both justification and condemnation.

On the one hand, the wealthy can believe that they are rich solely because they have mastered money, and manage it well. They are justified by the money system to think themselves more worthy or blessed.

On the other hand the poor are condemned to be poor because they don’t manage their money well. And because they are bad with money, they only have themselves to blame for being poor. This is the dark side of this notion that money is ours to control. And if we fail to control it well we deserve the consequences.

To all this Jesus says, “No!, Money is a master”. Money can enslave you. And if we are servants of money, we are not serving God. In fact we begin to serve a different god altogether.

Money can appear to be god-like. In our capitalist economy, money is all powerful, and everywhere at once. It alone appears to have the power to create and to destroy. Almost nothing gets done without money.

Yet despite its omnipresence, money remains a mystery. Who knows where money comes from? Who creates money? Where does it go when wasted?

These days most of us have our money in banks and know how much they have by seeing a line on a bank statement or computer screen. But we cannot see, touch, or smell this money as we can cash. It exists as entries in computers somewhere.

These are modern mysteries to many people – even bankers. The global financial crisis happened in part because bankers invented sophisticated products that they themselves did not fully understand. Truly enslaved to money, some bankers were so controlled and disciplined by money that it ultimately had the last word, with devastating consequences. Perhaps linked to a financial downturn are the last week’s spate of banker deaths in the world’s financial capitals.

In light of this, those who maintain that money is still merely a tool are fooling themselves. As the Catholic social critic Ivan Illich once said:

“A tool can grow out of man’s control, first to become his master and finally to become his executioner”.

How many people have been killed by money or been sacrificed to it?

Closer to home, how many children live in poverty in New Zealand because to provide their families with adequate wages or benefits would be fiscally imprudent? It could be said that we are sacrificing our children in service to the demands of money.

This is an election year. By the end of the year we will most likely have a new government of one form or another. People have told me that key election issues for them will be how money is distributed in society. And I think it’s fair to say that issues of poverty and inequality are very likely to be issues in this election year.

Those who advocate a more equitable redistribution of wealth are sometimes accused of holding to a “politics of envy”. They are accused of being envious of the rich and this envy translates into a desire to redistribute the wealth which, as the theory goes, the rich alone have created.

Those seeking a more equitable distribution of wealth aren’t always envious, they might be simply concerned with the direction of society and giving a fair deal to all.

But we should not dismiss this accusation of envy altogether. We can appreciate the warning that we should be careful of being envious. Envy is one of the seven deadly sins and can destroy our very soul.

But we should also remember that other deadly sins are gluttony, greed, and pride. Those with wealth need to remember that money will tempt them to display their wealth in a prideful manner, and by doing so encourage the envy of others. As Christians we need to be careful that our actions do not lead our brothers and sisters into sin.

Such care for our neighbour is counter-cultural in an age of the cult of celebrity which promotes the accumulation of wealth in order to emulate movie stars and corporate high-fliers.

Such imitation of the wealthy are acts in the service of money – money becomes upheld as the way to gain acceptance, fame, influence, and as the quickest way in which to enjoy the good life.

These are, perhaps, extreme examples. Closer to home we can be tempted to think that once we have enough money, either as a household or as a nation then, and only then, can we afford to serve the needs of the poor in our midst.

Another way in which money is a false god is offering itself a medium of justice. Money can nowadays be used to buy justice, but never God’s justice.

This last week we saw how money can be used to try to attain justice for Maori. Whether you think Treaty settlements are too low or too high, the idea that justice for Maori means monetary compensation buys into the notion that money can do the work of justice. The focus on money risks ignoring issues of Maori sovereignty, iwi autonomy, and the protection of taonga. Money alone can never bring justice to Maori.

But where there are signs that past wrongs are being acknowledged and new relationships built, we can celebrate these as steps towards a fuller notion of justice.

In our own lives we are called to serve God in joy and in serving God we find our freedom and true human fulfillment.

We can, each and every one of us, serve God and our neighbour directly and whenever we encounter them.

This is our calling today.

Amen.

On the Living Wage and Wage Slavery in Catholic Social Teaching

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livingwage

In New Zealand there is currently a campaign in support of a Living Wage. While the adult minimum wage here is currently $13.50 an hour (see rates) the proposed living wage for a couple with kids is $18.40 (according to research done bythe Family Centre Social Policy Research Unit). The living wage campaign aims at morally persuading employers to pages wages adequate for their employees to support their families in a life with dignity with full-time work.

Supporters of the campaign include church agencies from all denominations. I was a little bemused to see that the director of the Catholic development agency, Caritas, was reported in the following way:

Speaking in support of the principle of a living wage, Caritas Director Julianne Hickey says Catholic social teaching has long supported the concept that workers have a right to a just participation in the fruits of their labour. This means working people must be able to look after their families adequately on what they earn.

‘The concept of a living wage was developed over 100 years ago by United States theologians, a very practical application of Catholic social teaching on just wages,’ says Mrs Hickey.  [SOURCE]

I’m not which theologians she is referring to, but for Catholic Social teaching on the notion of wages I would go to the source of modern Catholic Social Teaching – Pope Leo XIII. In his seminal encyclical Rerum Novarum he outlined several principles of just wages. It is worth noting that the tradition of just wages is based on the medieval notion of the just price, a common church teaching several centuries old.

The word ‘just’ is critical. It is does not refer to just as automatically coming from the negotiations between a willing buyer and willing seller as found in economic versions of justice. Theologians commonly hold to other versions of justice, as Leo XIII outlines:

Wages, as we are told, are regulated by free consent, and therefore the employer, when he pays what was agreed upon, has done his part and seemingly is not called upon to do anything beyond. The only way, it is said, in which injustice might occur would be if the master refused to pay the whole of the wages, or if the workman should not complete the work undertaken; in such cases the public authority should intervene, to see that each obtains his due, but not under any other circumstances. (Rerum Novarum, ¶43)

Leo XIII goes on to say that in the case of wages, there is a higher natural law than the market governing what it is right to pay someone:

Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. (Rerum Novarum, ¶45)

So even from this one source we may conclude that the Catholic Church has good reasons for supporting the Living Wage campaign and argue against wages that are too low for families to support themselves. But there is another issue here that Catholic Social Teaching can shed light on, and that is the notion of Wage Slavery.

This notion has been a concern of the Catholic form of social theology called Distributism. Distributism is an interpretation of Catholic Social Teaching which was promoted by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. Another distributist was the Irish Dominican Vincent McNabb, who advocated that while we should support a wage based on the standard of living (instead of a standard of dying!) we should also reject the idea that everyone should be a wage-earner. He thought that as many people as possible should own their own means to earn a living. The distributists believed that when people become wholly dependent on wages or the welfare state they were reduced to the status of slaves, hence, Belloc’s book The Servile State.

McNabb followed Leo XIII when he writes that:

The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners. (Rerum Novarum, ¶46)

By increasing ownership he thought that wage-earning would decrease, with favourable social benefits.  For more on McNabb’s ideas see his The Church and the Land.

It would be interesting to learn how many New Zealanders who were previously owners of their own businesses or owned their own means of production (perhaps by being artisans or independent tradespeople) are now reduced to the status of wage-earners in the employ of others. For example, how many butchers and bakers have been driven to shut up shop, only to be employed behind the counters at large supermarkets? They might still make ends meet, but they have sacrificed no small amount of freedom in the process.

Is a living or minimum wage the best some people can now hope for? Or can we also value the small business person to gain some control over their economic life by being a owner of their own business?

Sadly in New Zealand too many people can only aspire to be a wage-earner and rent-payer, rather than a owner of their own home paid for by their earned surplus.