Eating Together

For twenty years, I've led Maundy Thursday services, ever since I started down the pastoring path.

It was never a thing for me growing up in church, as my home church was a big downtown congregation at the heart of the nation's capital.  Even if there'd been a service there, it'd have been such a pain navigating traffic that my parents wouldn't have tolerated it.

As I've spent my ministry career in small congregations, I've always run the service in the simplest of ways.  No complex liturgies or innovations, just a good ol' potluck, framed by the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the cup.  It's as simple a way as possible to mark the Last Supper, and the command to celebrate communion with one another.

As a creature that takes deep comfort in habit and ritual, I've always brought both bread (challah, typically, because it's way tastier than matzoh, and the Lord's Supper ain't a Seder) and soup.  The soup is always the same soup, several boxes worth of Trader Joe's Tomato and Red Pepper.  It's pretty tasty.

This year, I started out to do the same thing.  But three things changed the arc of the evening.  

First, there was already going to be plenty of soup for everyone, a tasty homemade vegetable stew.  My contribution wouldn't be necessary, and if prior years were any guide, I'd end up taking it home.  Despite my best efforts to consume it, most of it would go bad, and then get dumped into my compost.  Composting meant that at least it returns to the earth, but it still felt like a waste.

Second, earlier in the day I'd chatted with church volunteers about the ever expanding demand for food in the town.  Our tiny Little Free Pantry pushed through twenty five tons of food last year, and with more and more economic pressure on the DC area, that seems to be increasing.  The stream of souls coming to our door in search of sustenance is swelling.  Across the way at the town's food bank, the shelves are increasingly bare.  Wasting food in that context seems even less tolerable.

And third, well, there were the words of the Apostle Paul from his letter to the endlessly frustrating Corinthians.  In preparation for the service, I'd re-read the section where he challenges them over the mess they'd made of the Lord's Supper.  They'd modeled their communion after the cultural expectations of the Greco-Roman feast.  There, the important and influential guests ate first and abundantly, and the poor and unknown were served last, getting scraps or nothing.

This annoyed the bejabbers out of Paul.  As The Message puts it:

I find that you bring your divisions to worship—you come together, and instead of eating the Lord’s Supper, you bring in a lot of food from the outside and make pigs of yourselves. Some are left out, and go home hungry. Others have to be carried out, too drunk to walk. I can’t believe it! Don’t you have your own homes to eat and drink in? Why would you stoop to desecrating God’s church? Why would you actually shame God’s poor? I never would have believed you would stoop to this. And I’m not going to stand by and say nothing.

With Paul's words echoing in my soul, I set those boxes of soup into the donation crate.  Afterwards, church folk ate and drank together, partaking of bread and cup and remembering Christ's call to love and serve.  It was a gracious time of fellowship, and there was more than enough for all.

And for those who come to us in need today, that soup will be there waiting for them.  

It's pretty tasty.

 

The Gold Colossus

Just like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our faded sunset gates now stands

A mighty harlot with a torch, whose flame

Is red bordello lighting, her true name

Daughter of Mammon. From her beacon-hand

Glows sultry invitation; her wild eyes command

The attention of all in the thrall of her fame.

“Bring, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

Through rouge-plump lips. “Give me your Rich, ones with More,

The High Net Worth, 'cause my wares ain't Free!

Y'all come! I'm Great, your high-priced Whore,

Send five million, cash, you wanna get with me! 

I lift my skirt beside the golden door!"

with genuine apologies

to Emma Lazarus

Anarcholibertarian and Anarchocapitalist

Anarcholibertarianism is a peculiar thing, I'll admit.  

It is not the same thing as anarchocapitalism, because anarchocapitalism is a raging oxymoron and conceptually self-annihilating.  

Corporations and corporate power structures are no less a threat to liberty than political power structures.  Because capital is social power, eh?  Capital exhibits all of the gravitic tendencies of human power to concentrate itself, creates all of the same wild imbalances and injustices, and is ultimately as much threat to freedom and human dignity as any other form of collective power.

Wealth has always worked this way, which is why my moral teacher spent a remarkably large amount of time challenging the ethics of capital in his day.  Profit maximization and the relentless focus on the accrual of capital were, for him, fundamentally suspect and dangerous to our integrity as persons.  

At best, wealth represented a system that needed to be subverted and used slyly against itself.  

At worst, Mammon was the heart of our failure.  It is the system that enslaves us.

Which, again, is why it is so peculiar seeing those who are nominally libertarian so enthralled by the power dynamics of capital.  It is no less a danger to liberty than concentrations of political power.  Assuming that the accrual of socially mediated proxies for ownership and control somehow makes one more "free" is absurd.

Freedom, for the libertarian, is an essential state of being, a fundamental aspect of sentience and personhood.  It is an inalienable right.  It will always stand independent from imagined structural frameworks, be they legal or economic.

The Great Triumph of Global Capitalism

In addition to taking advanced coursework on pastoral counseling, I'm also rounding out my D.Min. electives with a class on the sociocultural context of the Apostle Paul's letters.   Meaning, what was the world like, really, when he fired off those annoyed letters to the endlessly fractious Corinthians?

I've been reading one book for the last few days, the one I've got to complete a paper on by the end of the month.  It's by a professor of religion at Baylor, and delves deep into Paul's attitude towards the poor and disenfranchised.  Some of it is…um…"academic."  Two entire chapters parsing out scholarly responses to one…ONE…verse in Galatians?  Lord have mercy.

But some of it is really kinda fascinating.  

Like, say, the exploration of the way income and wealth worked out in Rome.  Using the best available historical data of the economy of Rome in the first and second centuries CE, historians have come up with a scale measuring the income structure of the world at the time Paul was writing.  

Several scales are proposed, but one seven point scale has significant data behind it.  It goes like this:

1) Imperial Elites  (members of the dynasty, senatorial families, royalty):  0.04% of population

2) Regional/Provincial Elites (equestrian families, provincial officials, military elites): 1.0 % of population

3) Municipal Elites (decurial families, some merchants and freed persons): 1.76% of population

4) Moderate Surplus (merchants, artisans, military veterans, traders): 7% of population

5) Stable/Near Subsistence Level (merchants/traders, wage earners, shop owners, some farmers): 22%

6) Borderline Subsistence-Unstable (small farms, laborers, most merchants, small shop owners): 40%

7) Poverty/Below Subsistence (small farms, beggars, disabled, unskilled labor, widows, slaves): 28%

Meaning, if you translate that into where humanity stood two thousand years ago, about nine point eight percent of humanity living under the rule of the Roman Empire were economically secure.  They could reasonably expect that they would experience no significant hardship.  A tiny fraction--just under two percent--controlled most of the wealth.  An additional seven percent were functionally secure, consistently receiving enough income to maintain a surplus.

Twenty two percent were just above subsistence, meaning hunger was at bay and shelter was consistently present, but they were vulnerable.  And sixty-eight percent were either in poverty or scrambling day to day just to keep afloat, one accident or illness away from real privation.

That was two thousand years ago, before industrialization, before science and technology, before the global economy and the dynamism of capital markets.

Now, according to the magazine Business Insider, our world looks like this.  Give a click on the image below:

That bottom number hasn't budged.  Sixty eight percent remain poor.  Two thousand years, and for all intents and purposes, not a thing has changed economically.  The wealth profile of our world looks no different than the world ruled by Rome.  

On the bright side, I suppose, that makes everything the Bible has to say about justice, wealth and poverty still completely relevant.  

Yay.

Driving in a Time of Austerity

We drive, we Americans.  But it helps, sometimes, if we pay attention to the folks we're driving past.

On my way home from church this Sunday, I passed through Potomac, bucketing down River Road as it parallels the flow of the river towards Washington.  I was on my way home for Father's Day, when vegetarian-I would have the pleasure of grilling burgers and chicken for the gathered family.

Such a peculiar vegetarian delight, to grill meat.  That smell.  Ah, that smell.  No wonder Abel's sacrifice was so much more satisfying.

As I motored along, I passed as I always through the land of the mega-mansions, huge estates and garganto-super-homes, in which the D.C. power-brokers and CEOs of large federal contractors live.

One in particular caught my eye, a 20,000 square-foot jobbie behind a gleaming picket fence, up on a perfectly manicured hill.  The circular driveway was full, packed with cars, more than a dozen.  Probably family, arrived for a father's day gathering.

I ran a mental inventory, quick from a lifetime of car watching.  Multiple Mercedes S Classes and BMW Seven Series.  A couple of Lexus LSes.  A Range Rover, and two Mercedes SUVs.  An Aston Martin.  Two Porsches.  Nothing more than three years old.

Again, Washington is a government town.  It's our only real industry.  That's your tax money, right there.  They're doing fine.

And today, I was driving again.

Being a part time pastor does a variety of things for me.  I have time to write.  I have time to pursue further studies.   I have time for laundry, and dishes, and yardwork.

But I also have time, fallow time, in which I can volunteer.  Meaning, do something I want to do, because it is self-evidently good and I enjoy doing it.  I choose to help out at the local Meals on Wheels.  It's my Thursday mid-morning activity.

I go to the nearby Baptist church, where a representative of a local coalition of faith communities coordinates the program.   Then I pick up meals, and drive them around to a half-dozen elderly and disabled folks.  It's a self-evidently valuable thing, assuming you didn't watch Logan's Run and think it seemed like a good idea.

Today, I drove eight meals in our rusting but trusty old van.  To a retired veteran, ninety years old, alone in his house.  To a tiny polite Asian woman, hands gnarled into clubs by arthritis. To others, all aging or struggling with disabilities.  Out front of their homes?  Many have no car at all.  Others, early 1990s Buicks.  A 1998 Corolla.  A rusted out van.

It is here that we have chosen to cut, as the Federal Government tightens our collective belt.  Support for these folks has been slashed.  In some rural areas, these humble meals are being eliminated, one of the few things permitting these souls the dignity of remaining in their homes.

We have to cut costs, they say.  We have to tighten our belts, they say.

When I see houses along River Road with clusters of Chinese scooters, well-worn Ford F150s, and high mileage Chevy Cobalts out front, maybe I'll believe it.

Attacking Success

One of the soundbites that's been pitched out this political silly season has been catching in my craw whenever I hear it.  Both political parties are responsible for some pretty egregious allegations...the "Romney hates dogs" one being particularly silly...but this one echoes interestingly in my pastorly ears.

This is the charge, leveled by Romney and the GOP, that Obama is "attacking success" when suggesting that perhaps some forms of profit-maximization aren't good for the country, or suggesting that those who have profited most in our society might just have to pony up a bit more so we can keep our collective [stuff] together.

The rich and the powerful are unquestionably materially successful.  Success is good.  In fact, their success is both evidence of and the key to our being successful as a nation.  To argue that the powerful have some larger responsibility for supporting the necessary infrastructure of the nation subverts something basic about America.

Or so that line of argumentation goes.

Herein should lie a problem for conservatives.  Some conservatives, at least.

The Ayn Rand folks'll get along just fine, but the Jesus folk?

It's a bit more difficult.

That's not to say that equating material success with goodness isn't done in certain quarters of the Christian world.  It's a staple of the Word Faith Prosperity Gospel movement, for example.  But "success" in financial dealings or in material well-being has never been and will never be a Christian measure of ethical well-being or national integrity.

You won't, for instance, get any more pungent attacks on wealth than you find in the prophets.   Isaiah rails against the Jerusalem elite who took the bulk of Judah's wealth and threw their culture out of balance.  So does Amos.  So does Jeremiah.   The concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a few has been a big deal since Samuel prophesied about the nature of royalty, or the writers of Torah put in all that debt-forgiveness year-of-Jubilee stuff in the name of preserving the integrity of the Covenant against permanent systemic imbalances.

And that's just the Judeo-part of the whole Judeo-Christian equation.

Then there's Jesus.  Lord have mercy, did he seem to have a problem with the implications of material success.   Oh, we do rationalize our way around those sayings, that "camel through the eye of a needle" and "gaining the world but losing your soul" stuff.  Not to mention the whole "you cannot serve God and mammon" bit.  Or the cross.

Pesky, pesky Jesus.

And then there's Paul.  Paul, well, he doesn't seem to buy into the whole shiny thing.  What matters is integrity in faith, which is proved not by evidence of material success, but by perseverance in the face of suffering and challenge.  That's the whole point of Paul's diatribe against the "super-apostles" in 2 Corinthians, who shone and sparkled and "succeeded" with all the high-gloss-buffed self-confidence of a Manhattan socialite.

In the Greco-Roman world, Christians were often attacked as "sapping the vitality" of the high-energy pagan imperial/commercial synergy.   I'm not sure they used the word "synergy," but they would have if they'd known it.

But what is clear is that the True Gospel challenge to material succeedification remains the stumbling block it has always been.

What Ann Romney Did Not Say

Yesterday was a typical day.  I woke at around 6:30 am, creaked out of bed, and rousted both of my middle-schoolers.   They got fed, watered, and presentable, while I pulled together food for their lunches. Nothing gives you an appreciation for Moses in the wilderness with complaining Israelites like late-Passover week as you prep yet another matzoh-based meal.

I drink a cup of coffee, and out the door they go, bags of unleavened lunch in hand.  The dog gets walked.  I get back, drink another cup of coffee and straighten the kitchen.  From there, I water our fledgling strawberry patch, and then gather up laundry for the six loads I'll do during the day.  The laundry gets cranking, and after reading and writing a blog, it's off to deliver Meals on Wheels to seniors in my community.

After passing some time with both the elderly saint who runs the program, and getting to know the pastor of the neighborhood Baptist church that houses it, I come home.  This is followed by more laundry, folding and sorting and prepping.  That process is interrupted by the little guy, who calls furtively from his school to let me know that he's managed to leave his gym shirt at home.

Please, Dad!  Can you bring it?  It's next period!  Please?

And so I hop onto my motorcycle (more efficient, dontcha know) with a gym shirt, run it by the school, and on the way back run an errand I'd been planning on running later.  Home again means more laundry, and then the kids come loping down the street from the bus-stop.  Sweet Mary and Joseph, is it that time already?

We review homework status for the day, and then I mow the lawn, after which I water the back lawn where the East Coast drought is making re-growing dog-destroyed grass a bit harder, and tend to the drought-sensitive dogwoods.

Then the little guy needs to go to drum practice, and so off we go in the minivan to a three hour practice, most of which I spend in Starbucks reading highfalutin' churchy books for my next paper.

The day included some down time, some work-related emails, and some study for an advanced degree.  But mostly, I spent yesterday home-making.   It's work, folks.   I know, because as a part-time pastor with a full-time-plus working wife, that's at least half of what I do.  

In defending herself against a bit of ill-considered political class snarkiness from a talking head who claimed she "hadn't worked a day in her life," Ann Romney was correct to say that that choice does not represent the choice to sit around on your behind all day.  Homemaking makes for being a busy little bee.

It is, even in this driven and careerist era, a choice with value, and one that should be respected.   In many ways, a more traditional one or one-and-a-half income household allows for a more balanced and gracious existence.  There's more time to be present for kids.  There's more time to get out and be part of the fabric of caring relationships that makes for strong communities.  It is a good way to live, honestly.   In saying this, I do not intend to devalue the efforts of two career families.  But the more traditional arrangement...even if the gender roles are flipped...can make space for sabbath and life-balance in a way that two full time jobs does not.

I've been both places.  I know.

What Ann Romney is saying is correct, and progressives should respect that choice.

But there is something that she is not saying.

The choice to stay home is not a choice all of us have the privilege of making.  For many Americans, the choice to do what I do or what Ann Romney does simply is no longer an option.  That's because while I'm not part of the one percent, I am part of the ten percent.  We are, for the moment, reasonably well off.

If I did not work at all, we'd still be able to live a comfortable life from my wife's income.  We'd still have health insurance.  We'd still have dental, and be able to pay for the significant and necessary orthodontia my older son needs to repair the mess our genes made of his mouth.  We could still replace a full set of car tires and not blink.  Heck, we could buy a used car and not blink.  We're busily paying down our mortgage, on a house we bought long enough ago that we're fathoms deep in equity.  We can go on vacations.

Though our modest rambler and unpresuming cars might not tell it, I have the choice to stay at home because our family is upper class.  It's an easy choice if you're comfortably well-off.

But for much of the middle and working class, that choice has become more difficult to make.  It used to be that one income would cover things.  Even factory jobs paid a good living wage, with benefits.  If one partner in a marriage chose to stay home and care for the kids, a family could swing it.

But then those jobs got outsourced to China in the name of higher profits and efficiency.   Those benefits got cut in the name of profit maximization, as holding companies like, oh, let's pick one at random, Bain Capital, captured the resulting profit at the expense of living wages for most Americans.

Salaries fell.  Home prices soared.   Suddenly working America was working three-and-a-half jobs instead of one just to pay the mortgage and the utilities.  Not to mention those medical expenses from when little Tyler fell and broke his/her arm.

Making ends meet becomes an issue, and families are forced to choose between financial stress and life-stress, and often are forced to endure both.   There are many parents who would rather not be scrambling to the daycare center late again because something came up at work, or scrambling to figure out how to deal with a kid with the flu when there just aren't any sick leave days left and you just can't afford to lose this job.  But they don't have that choice.

They don't have that privilege.

And the choice to be a traditional family shouldn't be in the realm of privilege.

The One Percent Commute

For sale!  Price? $4.8 million.  That's $18,000 a month, kids.

It's my commute every day now, this journey up River Road, northward to my little church in the little town of Poolesville.  I depart my modest brick rambler, located in an inside the Beltway Virginia suburb, in a neighborhood inhabited by federal workers and military officers.   These are not inexpensive homes, because nothing around DC is inexpensive.

But they are also utterly average, in fact, smaller than average.  It's a nice neighborhood, but it is not rich, at least not yet, not by the standards we so desperately cling to as we feel them slipping through our fingers.

I motor onto the Beltway, slog through traffic, cross the Potomac on the American Legion Bridge, and then take Exit 39 onto River, headed west north west, through an area called Potomac, Maryland.

I have often commented in blog-passing about the homes on this road, about their size and ostentation.  Today, I thought I'd share a representative sample of them with you, a picture being worth a thousand words and all.  So I stopped the bike, here and there, and took some snapshots.

A nice little driveway.

Understand this:  there is no significant industrial base in and around DC.  It is not a major financial center.  It is a government town, and I am not overreaching when I state that these homes are built on the foundation of our tax dollars and/or the good faith and credit of the United States.

They are not, of course, the homes of federal workers, those "wasteful bureaucrats" who exist primarily in the minds of those who buy what the right-wing corporate-funded media sells them.  You can live comfortably on a federal government income, but even people who've climbed the ladder all the way into senior executive service do not live in homes like this.

These are the homes of high powered lawyers, and lobbyists, and contractors.  These are the homes of those who live and work in the private sector, and who make their money off of government.  These are the homes of those with the power that comes with wealth.

A quaint little residence.

Now, some of the residents of these homes are perfectly pleasant people, I have no doubt.  I also don't doubt that many..if not all..of them are educated, hardworking, and driven.  Some may be quite charming.  Some of them may well have created interesting new products or services.  Some may be foreign dignitaries, here to schmooze and wine and dine.  I cannot speak to the particular merits of the souls in residence at these places, nor would I presume to.

But I can note, because it is hard to miss, that the row upon row of vast homes and estates out on the periphery of the nation's capital seem strangely incongruous in a time of concern about governmental efficiency and stifling debt. 

A personal favorite, for it's tackiness and eagle-based decor.

Driving a road upon which one passes one vast mansion after another after another, it's hard to see just quite how the ethic that builds these homes meshes with the economic worries that consume the nation whose wealth went into building them.  It's hard to see how these homes, which present like the estates of Venetian gentry or the dachas of Soviet commissars, mesh with the values of our republic as it struggles to find its feet again.

Though I've been riding this road for months, it still feels vaguely unseemly and unsettling as I pass through them.

Fortunately, River Road continues on, and the homes grow more modest.  By the time I've reached my destination, the surroundings are small town humble, surrounded by farmland and cattle and horses, large working plots of land with well-kempt but relatively modest homes.

It feels like America again.

Percentiles

As the Occupy movement continues to camp out in the downtowns of major metropolitan areas, I find myself wondering about the position of those of us who occupy the upper percentages of the income scale.

I'm one of the rich, you see.

That might be hard to discern from observation of my day to day life.  My home is nothing much to look at, a squat, rumpled, ivy-covered suburban hobbit hole, nestled in trees.  It's about half the size of the average new home in America, but it's perfectly comfy for the four of us and the dog.  We drive efficient and unsplashy vehicles.  Our kids go to public schools.  I wear clothes that look like they're older than my middle-school age children, which is because many of them are.  We've spent most of our lives saving and scrimping.

My own modest annual income places me pretty much dead center for individual incomes in the United States.  I'm fifty-third percentile, just like that grim and defiant young reactionary whose image has been making the rounds lately.   But my wife, driven and smart and competent woman that she is, well, she's done well lately.   Her recent job transitions and career progression have tossed us up into an entirely different income category.

And for the first time in our respective lives, we can't accurately describe ourselves as middle class.  We're not.  We're somewhere between 95th and 96th percentile, and that, I fear, puts us squarely into the upper quartile of the upper class in the United States.

Does that make us better of more "blessed" than those in the lowest quartile of the bottom thirty percent?  No, not in any meaningful way, no matter what Joel Osteen says.  It does mean our lives are easier, both in the ways that make sense and in the ways the system in which we operate favors the wealthy.   We have no trouble getting credit, which we use sparingly.  Having walked alongside folks who desperately needed credit, but couldn't get it, this is a nontrivial thing.   We have enough of a buffer of amassed savings that we don't face uncertainty week to week or month to month, and there are many in our culture who do not have that luxury.  At the moment, my family does not worry about money.  This is utterly untrue for a substantial portion of Americans.

That doesn't even begin to factor in the many billions of human beings on this planet who live at levels so far below the US poverty line that we Americans don't really grasp just how immensely challenging the simple task of their existence is. 

Should I anguish over where I find myself?  Should I wallow in guilt?  No, I don't think so, and I don't. 

What I must not do, though, is allow my families' relative comfort right now to seduce me into believing that everything is just fine with the world.  It's not.  Not at all, and letting material comfort blind me to the struggles and suffering of others gets me into significant trouble with my Boss. Not to mention that wealth and material power aren't anywhere near to being one of the metrics He uses to assess the value of my existence.

It's a tricky wicket.

Rich Foolish Churches

The sermon "remnant" for this week came as I preached out of the Gospel of Luke. Jesus is laying into the notion that material wealth means jack diddly squat to the essential core of his message about the Kingdom of God. Having stuff and desiring material success and seeking wealth is utterly alien to the purpose of the Gospel.

This was a bit of a tough message for my community, which is mostly comprised of youngish Asians whose spiritual upbringing was in churches that preached the Korean variant of the "health and wealth gospel." Jesus wants you in that test prep course! How else will you ever become a doctor and/or a lawyer?

It was tough for me, too. This was not because I buy into the magickal mystery tour of the thriving prosperity movement.

It was, instead, because in reading Luke 12, I encountered two verses that are commonly used by pastors in their stewardship sermons. The first is Luke 12:21, where the rich fool is berated for not being "rich towards God." This is commonly presented as a fundraising scripture. Be "rich" in your giving, or ooooooh are you like this idiot! The second is Luke 12:34, that favorite old chestnut of the stewardship sermon series, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." If you really really really loved the church the way you're supposed to, then you'd have upped your pledge for this year. Show me the treasure!

I may even have used that last one myself at some point.

But the purpose of Christ's teachings in Luke 12 has nothing to do with material wealth, other than to reject it as meaningless and the pursuit of it as irrelevant to the Gospel. As I prepared my sermon, which was much more focused on the individual and the personal implications of this, it struck me that Christ's rejection of material attainment applied just as pointedly to collectives.

Meaning, perhaps it shouldn't just define churchgoers. Perhaps it should apply to churches as well. The energies we pour into the growth of our buildings and our institutions seems really no more relevant to the Gospel than the profitable machinations of that wealthy Judean.

It's not an evil thing, necessarily. For every church whose spiritual life is all about new carpets and building additions, there's a church that is using its building wisely. It's just neither here nor there when it comes to what matters.

I have to remember to forget this come stewardship season.

Living In Samaria

As I preach weekly, I'm very often stuck with leftovers. Leftovers are those ideas that come pouring out of my study and reflection on the texts, but that don't really fit within the theme and focus of the day. I can't stand long meandering brain-dump preaching myself, so I'd never intentionally inflict it on others.

After two weeks of preaching from the prophet Amos, one of the big "leftovers" has to do with sociopolitical context. It's clear that one of the major issues for Amos was an unsustainable imbalance of economic power. In the eighth century BCE, Israel was experiencing a time of prosperity...sort of. Wealth and power were accumulating, but that accumulation was occurring primarily around the urban centers, like Samaria and Bethel. Those who served the king did quite well. Those who sold to those who served the king did quite well. The scribes and the priests and the merchants were rolling in it.

But everywhere else, things bit. Exorbitant prices and punishingly high taxes were the price paid to insure that the centers of power stayed powerful, and that the merchants and the merchant's wives lived in the standard to which they were accustomed. So the majority of the people...the farmers and the laborers...knew suffering, while a few islands of prosperity flourished around power.

I live in such an island. I was born and raised in the DC suburbs. That's not to say that there aren't shuttered businesses and foreclosed homes here inside the Beltway. But as our homeland security infrastructure blossoms and spreads and sprawls, most of those jobs are here. More and more military suppliers and contractors are re-siting their headquarters here to DC. Best to be near where the money is if you want to make a few bucks off of our Forever War. And so our area does really rather well.

Of course, prices here are higher. And while the apparent taxes on y'all outside the Beltway aren't punishingly high, your actual tax levels are masked behind debt, debt that is being incurred on the basis of your credit. Meaning, you are, in fact, being punitively taxed. You just don't grasp it, because the bill keeps not being sent, because America only elects cowards who tell us that we can get something for nothing. Only you don't get that something.

And so when I hear Amos laying into the wealthy, I hear him laying into the god of security which we worship. And from which my community profits.

The peskiest thing about Amos is that the stone mansions and the vineyards that he describes could be in the neat neighborhoods of Mclean. Or in the stately McEstates of Loudon County. Or in Bethesda, in the beautiful multi-million dollar homes that surround my church.

So I haven't quite gotten around to preaching about it. It's hard to turn that poison cup into a Practical Lesson for Your Life Now (tm). It's too hard a word. But though Amos suggests that the prudent remain silent in evil times, it does seem worth at least blogging about it.

The King You Have Chosen

During a conversation last night with another pastor who serves a congregation here in the Washington Metropolitan area, we found ourselves noting just how...well...rich everyone in DC is. Not everyone, mind you. There is plenty of poverty here. But when you step back for a second and look at the population in and around our nation's capital, you realize just how much money there is here.

That foundation of wealth just got a little bump upwards this week, as defense contracting giant Northrop Grumman committed to relocating it's headquarters to the Virginia suburbs of Washington. In fact, they're likely to locate themselves within walking distance of my home, right near my high school, in an office park where me and the missus...well...we used to...err..."hang out" in the empty parking lots there on occasion when we were dating. You know, talking about politics.

Ahem.

In the Forbes list of the wealthiest counties in the United States, for instance, six out of the top ten counties are here around the Beltway. That's a supermajority of American wealth, kids, the kind of majority that lets you ram any legislation you want through the hallowed [buttocks] of the Senate. Loudon, Fairfax, Howard, Fairfax City, Arlington, and Montgomery all have pretty stunning levels of wealth. How stunning? The median household income here in Fairfax is $106,000. Nearby Loudon County has us beat, with a median household income of $110,000. That's more than twice the national average.

Now, many of those households are two-income. Many fall below that level. It is worth noting that the folks who skew that median upwards are not federal workers, but rather the impressive array of industry lawyers and industry lobbyists and defense contractors. Civil servants aren't the folks living in the 10,000 square foot homes in Potomac and Loudon. Associate Vice Presidents of General Dynamics and Executive Counsels for Lockheed Martin are.

Honestly, though, the blame for this peculiar skewing of wealth to the power elites lies not with the increasingly fat cats here in Washington. This, my fellow Americans, is the government you want.

It's right there in the Bible, in 1 Samuel 8. We Americans have an obsession with defending ourselves, with being sure that we have the weapons and organization needed to protect our national interests. That's why military spending, which is the primary generator of inside-the-Beltway wealth, is entirely off the table as we consider ways to reduce our insane national debt. Only slightly crazy folks out on the margins like myself even think about cutting military spending.

That obsession should be familiar. It is the very same desire that spurred the demand of the Israelites for a king. We want that centralized power, because in that centralized power lies our ability to organize and plan and research the various ways to crush America's enemies under the boots of our shiny new orbital battle platform.

But, as with any king, our demand for that power has a cost:

This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive grows and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day. (1 Samuel 8:11-18)

Jerusalem and Washington. Saul and the Military Industrial Complex. Six of one, a half dozen of the other.

For a nation purportedly steeped in Judeo-Christian values, it's impressive how utterly clueless we are about this.

"Those who do not know the Bible are doomed to repeat it."

Mystic Bling

Another of the ways that mysticism tends to get spun in our consumption-addled culture is as a means to the acquisition of more stuff.

Why should the mystic walk barefoot up the mountain, when they could instead float...on the buttery smooth suspension of their eco-friendly Lexus RX450h, their holy tushie coddled warm against the heated leather seats, as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan serenades them through the astounding 330 watt Mark Levinson 15 speaker 7.1 surround sound system? Ah...such inner peace....

When you're connected to the universe in profound and mysterious ways, why shouldn't those connections result in the universe serving up some schweet, schweet schwag? After all, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And if you know the Creator of the Universe on an existential level, then why shouldn't you leverage your connectness, making Oneness with Being serve up some Oneness with Bling?

This approach to "mystic" faith can be found everywhere. It seems to have almost completely hijacked Kabbalah in the popular imagination, as folks traipse about imagining that the little red threads they wear somehow connect them with a future McMansion, or at a bare minimum will allow them to download Madonna's music for free.

This is, to use a delightfully archaic word, balderdash.

Though mysticism is earthy and practical and woven into the fabric of being, possessiveness is utterly alien to any true mystic. The desire to acquire is meaningless to those who yearn most deeply for God. As George MacD puts it:

The man who for consciousness of well-being depends on anything but life, the life essential, is a slave...

and:

But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.

and, here sounding remarkably like a Scottish mystic Yoda:

If it be things that slay you, what matter whether things you have, or things you have not?

The mystic renounces desire for power in all of its forms, be it economic or coercive. They simply cease to seem meaningful. The unsatisfied, ever-empty hunger of the consumer is unknown and unwanted. That doesn't mean living a joyless, stale, or austere life. It simply means a different way of standing in relation to creation, one that is far richer and more abundant. As MacDonald puts it:

He who has God, has all things, after the fashion in which He who made them has them.

Next to the touch of a breeze, or the smell of the honeysuckle, or the laughter of your children, or the bright moon on a clear Spring evening, the cloying cornucopia of consumerism seems a rather empty nothing.

All Hail Our Beloved Chinese Masters!

There's been plenty of back and forth about the recent Supreme Court decision permitting corporations to directly support or oppose candidates for political office. Some folks, mostly libertarians and conservatives, argue that preventing corporations from engaging in this sort of activity represents a violation of the First Amendment. If a business is prevented from supporting or opposing someone, and cannot run ads directly attacking or lauding that individual, then the rights of the owners and directors of that corporation are being violated.

Or so the argument goes.

Yesterday, while passing some time in good meaty political discussion with a church deacon, I realized that there was an element to this whole thing that I had not previously considered.

American corporations are not individuals, sure. They wield far more power and influence. But they are also increasingly not American. We do not live in an age when the interests of business play out on a local or national level. This is, as anyone who pays attention should have realized by now, the era of market globalization. For all of our jabbering about the importance of small business, business does not now exist on a primarily local level. It exists across national boundaries. Because of this, ownership of corporate entities in the United States does not stop at our borders. One does not have to be a citizen of this nation to own or govern an entity incorporated here. So what does that mean?

Let's for a moment imagine the 2012 race for the presidency of the United States of America. One candidate strongly favors pressing China more aggressively on their approach to human rights, and wants the United States to begin weaning itself from foreign oil. Following this last week's Supreme Court decision, there is no impediment to corporations that exist as subsidiaries of the Chinese government from throwing as much money as they want into attack ads against that candidate. There is nothing to prevent Aramco and Citgo from doing exactly the same thing.

Sure, nonprofits and associations can try to do the same. But they're drops in the bucket. Wealth is power, and an immense imbalance of power that has been created here. Sure, there have been periods in the history of the United States when business has been a governing power in the affairs of state. But the dynamics of the marketplace in the 1890s were still mostly national in scope, and the interests of the robber barons were at least tangentially linked to the interests of this nation. They were, at a bare minimum, citizens. In 2010, wealth is radically global...and the most powerful corporations no longer see their interests tied to those of this particular nation.

I'm not alone in noticing this. E.J. Dionne pitched out a very similar theme this morning. But most human beings only see what is right around them. We are compulsively parochial little critters. In a nation that is soon to be ruled not by citizens, but by the power of multinational corporations, that lack of a broader vision will bear predictable fruit. We have already allowed multinational corporations to strip this nation of it's productive capacity, which even our enemies recognized as our greatest strength. Now, they will dominate our political discourse.

But I hear that Octomom has a new bikini bod. That makes it all better.

Abundance and Poverty

Over the past several months, I've been chewing over the ethic of abundance in the context of Christian faith. Abundance is the the keyword for a huge portion of contemporary Christianity, particularly that portion that likes to call itself the Word Faith movement. Word-Faithers, who preach what's generally called the prosperity gospel, tell us that to receive abundantly, you must give abundantly. The more you give, the more you'll get.

Want to get right with God? Then tithe! Add to your tithing! Double-tithe! Everyone loves a Holy High Roller! Be a blessing, and you will be blessed! This version of the Gospel is chirruped from countless megachurch stages, and sparkles alluringly as it passes through the gleaming perfect teeth of folks like Joel Osteen and Creflo A. Dollar.

It's great for fundraising. It's so great, in fact, that some recent seminars in my otherwise staid oldline denomination have encouraged just such an attitude. If you feel rich, if you feel "abundant," then you tend to give abundantly. Cheap or thrifty people make for lousy pledge units. There is truth in that, a truth that's been carefully encouraged by charlatans throughout the ages.

It's a biblical truth, though, and you can't for a moment dismiss it out of hand. When the Apostle Paul exhorts the money and power obsessed Corinthians to give joyously and generously, he's not being a hoochie-pastor. He's encouraging unselfishness to a people who live only for themselves. Generosity is an essential Christian virtue.

Understanding Paul, though, requires us to understand Christ on the subject, and Jesus is pretty specific about how our hearts need to be aligned. Are we to be "rich in spirit?" Um...actually...no. The rich don't really get many props from Jesus. In fact, they get hammered. Those who are wealthy now? They've gotten theirs, and they ain't gettin' anything more, unless by "more" you mean a painful existential wedgie from the Big Guy on the Day of Reckoning.

Instead, we are to be "poor in spirit." But what does that mean? It doesn't mean being cheap. It does mean not seeking wealth, or desiring to hold on to wealth. It means not desiring wealth, not grasping wealth, not holding on to wealth. It means having nothing, no matter how much you actually have. Having wealth means nothing. Not having wealth means nothing. A being that is oriented towards God and moved by God's grace will naturally give where there is need, because they don't care about themselves more than they care about others. The poor in spirit are abundant, generous beings, because everything they have can be turned to the service of those around them. They pour themselves out.

Where the Word Faith movement fails is where it inserts self-interest into the equation. Why do you give? To be blessed. But giving seeking blessings in return means exactly jack to Jesus. It's selfish, and self absorbed, and the exact opposite of the mindset that Jesus would have us embrace.