Category: Economy (Page 3 of 5)

Something Is Wrong! Something Is Broken! – From the Daily Office – May 16, 2013

May 16, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Psalter:

They asked, and quails appeared, and he satisfied them with bread from heaven.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Psalm 105:40 (BCP Version) – May 16, 2013.)

Grocery Shelves Once again I find this serendipitous connection between one verse in the Daily Office psalm and a news item in the daily papers. Psalm 105 is divided into two parts and our lectionary bids us read the first at Morning Prayer and the second at Evening Prayer. The psalm describes the Hebrews sojourn in Egypt. Part One (vv. 1-22) describes the captivity of Joseph and his later elevation to leadership in the pharaoh’s court, which occasioned the children of Israel taking refuge in “the land of Ham” where they were subsequently enslaved. Part Two (vv. 23-45) tells the story of Moses, the Exodus, and the Hebrews coming into the Promised Land.

So hunger and famine, deprivation and want surface as themes both as a cause of the Israelites residence and ensuing slavery in Egypt, and as a consequence of their journey through the Sinai desert escaping from that servitude. The quoted verse celebrates God’s provision of food during their desert trek.

In today’s Los Angeles Times there is an article which begins with this question, “What happens to the 40% of food produced but never eaten in the U.S. each year, the mounds of perfect fruit passed over by grocery store shoppers, the tons of meat and milk left to expire?”

Twice a month about 100 families line up in the parking lot and hallways of my church to receive a few bags of food. As a distribution point for the local food bank system, our pantry operation offers canned goods, fresh vegetables, meats, bread, and other staples, as well as such things as paper towels, toilet paper, and personal hygiene products, to those unable to afford them in the stores. On the last Saturday of each month we see our biggest crowds as the month’s Social Security, WIC, food stamps, and other assistance funds have diminished.

In light of that monthly experience, I read the L.A. Times’ opening question and all I can do is shake my head in wonder! 40% of food produced in this country is never eaten? And yet there are these hundreds of people lining up for a food hand-out in my church . . . and that scene is repeated across the country in countless venues, and on an almost daily basis. Something is wrong! Something is broken!

The partial answer to the Times’ question is that some of it goes into the production of electrical power. The article is about the Kroger grocery company (through its Ralph’s and Food4Less divisions) composting the “garbage” food and producing methane gas to power generators. While I applaud this environmentally sound disposal solution, I can’t help but wonder, “Wouldn’t it be better if the food didn’t go to waste? Wouldn’t it be better if, instead of allowing the food to become inedible, it was distributed to those who are hungry?”

In the story of the Exodus, the food provided by God – the quail and the manna – could not spoil because it could not be kept. It was to be gathered and eaten; whatever wasn’t eaten simply didn’t hang around – the quail flew off – the manna evaporated. So neither the psalm nor the longer story in Exodus provide guidance for what to do with leftovers. Common sense, I think, has to fill that in. And common sense, I think, suggests that instead of letting food go bad and become fodder for a methane generator, it ought to be used to feed the hungry. I also think that that would be more attuned to the Gospel imperative.

Turning old food into electricity is at least a sounder decision than that reported a few months ago in Augusta, Georgia, where the inventory of a bankrupt supermarket was simply thrown away – in the presence of hungry people hoping for a handout! The needy poor, according to an article in the Augusta Chronicle, stood in the parking lot and “watched marshals stand guard as food was tossed into the trash” and hauled away to the city dump. “Some people even followed the truck to the landfill and were still turned away,” GreenLeft reported.

God provided food for the people. God satisfied them with quail and bread. God still provides food for the people. How we use it or misuse it is up to us. We don’t seem to be doing a very good job. Something is wrong! Something is broken!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Economic Excrement, Financial Feces – From the Daily Office – May 13, 2013

May 13, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Prophet Ezekiel:

[God said to Ezekiel] “You shall eat it as a barley-cake, baking it in their sight on human dung.”

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Ezekiel 4:12 (NRSV) – May 13, 2013.)

Dung Fire Today’s Old Testament reading is a disturbing piece in which the Prophet Ezekiel is instructed to lie down for several days (in fact, for more than a year) as a sign of the number of years Israel and then Judah will be punished.

While lying down, he is to make grain cakes from specific measures of spelt, millet, wheat, barley, lentils, and beans, and he is to drink specific measures of water each day. This is to symbolize that during their punishments, the Israelites and the Judeans will lack bread and water; they will experience poverty and deprivation, and “look at one another in dismay, and waste away under their punishment.” (v. 17)

The selected verse is from God’s instructions to Ezekiel on how he is to prepare and bake his grain cakes, representative of the way in which the soon-to-be-exiled People of God will have to cook their food during their banishment.

The very thought of cooking with excrement must have been shocking to Ezekiel who objected and was given leave to use cow dung rather than human excreta. It would have been shocking in the extreme to people whose God had commanded them to cover their bodily wastes immediately after defecation because the very sight of it was offensive to God:

You shall have a designated area outside the camp to which you shall go. With your utensils you shall have a trowel; when you relieve yourself outside, you shall dig a hole with it and then cover up your excrement. Because the Lord your God travels along with your camp, to save you and to hand over your enemies to you, therefore your camp must be holy, so that he may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you.

The “designated area outside the camp,” though initially commanded as the latrine, was where everything unclean was to be disposed: the offal of sacrificed animals, warriors’ garments soiled with the blood the enemy, the stones of houses in which plague has been found, and the idols and altars of other nations are all commanded in the Law to be taken there. Persons deemed unclean because of leprosy, menstruation, issue of semen, or slaughter of animals were sent outside the camp. The “designated area outside the camp” was a place of defilement, uncleanness, impurity, corruption, dirtiness, filthiness, pollution, contamination, condemnation, punishment, rejection, castigation, and reproach. It is where disease, dung, and death were. To cook one’s food over excrement wasn’t simply distasteful, it was to imbue one’s nourishment with everything foul and unholy from the “designated area.” The smoke from a cooking fire of whatever fuel flavors anything cooked upon it; the smoke from a fire of human feces would pollute everything cooked over it.

In modern kitchens where we cook on electric burners or over clean natural gas flames, we no longer appreciate how the cooking fuel affects the flavor of the food. Many years ago, the summer of 1969 to be exact, I went to study in Florence, Italy. Upon arrival, I discovered that my pensione (boarding house) would not have a room for me until the next day. So, I checked into a small bed-and-breakfast hotel where I was offered an evening meal of chicken cacciatore. Having no other plans, I accepted. Unfortunately, the hotel kitchen used a kerosene stove. Chicken cacciatore cooked over kerosene is inedible; so too (I discovered the next morning) is coffee.

On the other hand, several years later, I had occasion to rent a cottage near the River Shannon in Ireland. It was heated by a peat stove and on that stove I could also boil water for my breakfast tea. Although I prefer coffee, one does want to be traditional occasionally when living in a 200-year-old, turf-fire-heated Irish farm cottage. My tea tasted of peat, which was an odd flavor, but not an inedible one (like kerosene). By the end of my month there everything I owned – my luggage, my books, all my clothing – smelled of peat. A couple of weeks later, touring a whisky distillery on the Isle of Skye, I discovered that good Scotch whisky (the malt for which is toasted over open peat fires) reminds me of my Irish cottage and, especially, of my morning tea.

I cannot imagine what food cooked over human feces might taste like, and I certainly do not want to find out! Apparently I’m not alone: a couple of years ago, a Japanese scientist perfected a method of making a vegan meat substitute using proteins extracted from human waste. Of over 12,500 who responded to an internet survey, 76% said there was no way they would even try the substance and another 11% said they were unsure whether they would. We can be very sure that the Israelites and the Judeans would not have wanted to; even the thought (or the threat) of eating food cooked over excrement was a religious affront to them.

However it might have tasted, the prophetic meaning is clear: food cooked over human feces is a symbol of abject poverty and want. It is a symbol of something unclean and contaminated to be avoided, not only for ourselves but for everyone. Poverty and deprivation are an abomination; any system which creates them should be viewed as corrupt and filthy, as economic excrement, as financial feces. It does not matter what name we may give such systems — capitalist or communist, socialist or fascist — if the success of the financial institutions created by those systems depends upon human beings being made destitute, those institutions and the system which creates them should be relegated to the “designated area outside the camp.” Like the smoke from a cooking fire of human dung, they pollute everything they touch. They are, simply put, shit not fit for human society.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Employers and Employees – From the Daily Office – January 25, 2013

January 25, 2013 / eric / 2 Comments

From the Letter to the Ephesians:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. Render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not to men and women, knowing that whatever good we do, we will receive the same again from the Lord, whether we are slaves or free. And, masters, do the same to them. Stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Ephesians 6:5-9 (NRSV) – January 25, 2013.)

Victorian Child Labor Photograph So let’s admit right off the bat that we have a problem here. Where the progressives and liberals among us would much prefer to read Paul condemning the institution of slavery, he does not. Instead, he simply admonishes slaves to be good slaves and masters to be good masters, and even goes so far as to analogize a Christian’s relationship with God (or Jesus) to slavery. This just doesn’t sit well in the modern mind and provides plenty of ammunition for those whom Friedrich Schleiermacher addressed as religion’s “cultured despisers.” We would much rather Paul hadn’t said this.

But he did. So what to think of it . . . .

First off, the Greek here is doulos which is most often translated as “slave” as it is here, but it can also refer to a bond-servant, a servant for hire, or to someone who is devoted to another without regard of his or her own interests (the last often metaphorically). It’s unlikely that Paul intended this as either a comment on non-slavery employment relationships or as a metaphorical statement, but we can certainly read it in those ways in our modern context.

Secondly, and this encourages us to read this text as applicable to modern employee-employer relations, the institution of slavery in the First Century Roman empire was an economic, not a racial, reality. We modern Americans, influenced by our own history, hear racial overtones in these verses, but they are not really there. In ancient Rome slaves might be prisoners of war, sailors captured and sold by pirates, slaves bought outside Roman territory, or even the children of desperately poor Roman citizens sold into bond-servanthood by their parents. Further, slaves were commonly and even rather frequently freed; a slave could buy his or her own freedom.

So if we read this text as referring not only to the First Century practice of slavery, but applying also to any economic institution wherein one person works at the behest of and for the benefit of another, it provides guidance for theological critique of contemporary employment practices and related laws. It requires the church to question any employment situation in which workers are inadequately paid, where worker safety is at risk, or which threatens to damage the family life or welfare of the worker and his or her dependents.

In fact, the long struggle to recognize and protect workers’ rights finds its genesis in this and similar biblical texts. In Great Britain and in our own country during the 18th and 19th Centuries (and even into the early 20th Century), children worked in mines and factories; all laborers worked six-day weeks and often 16- to 18-hour days; working conditions were often dangerous; and on-the-job death was a common occurrence. Fans of the series Downton Abbey (or earlier dramas such as Upstairs, Downstairs) need only think of the way in which the servants’ life is portrayed to see a small (and very toned-down) illustration of what a worker’s life was like, always at the beck-and-call of the employer.

The anti-slavery movement in Britain became the movement to bring about just and equitable labor laws, to prevent children from working, to reduce the work day to ten hours per day, and to make employers responsible for working conditions. That movement spread to the United States. In both Britain and America, it was driven by Christians, many of them Christian socialist Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church, who read these texts as demanding the ends they sought.

So we need not apologize to our “cultured despisers” for Paul’s words about slavery. Instead, we are called like our forebears in the faith to see in them our call to champion workers’ rights and just labor laws.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Putting God to the Test – From the Daily Office – November 23, 2012

November 23, 2012 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Prophet Malachi:

Will anyone rob God? Yet you are robbing me! But you say, “How are we robbing you?” In your tithes and offerings! You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me – the whole nation of you! Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts; see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Malachi 3:8-10 (NRSV) – November 23, 2012)

This “test me and see” verse is a favorite of preachers of the so-called “prosperity gospel” (of course, it’s not from a gospel, but that doesn’t seem to bother them). To have it turn up in the Daily Office readings the day after the United States celebrated Thanksgiving Day is a real eye-opener! On Face Book this morning, a humorous “meme”* showed up picturing a young woman at prayer holding a credit card with this caption: “Dear God, we are so thankful for all we have . . . now, if you excuse us, we’ve got to go get more stuff. There’s a great Black Friday sale at Best Buy!” Could there have been a better juxtaposition?

Malachi says pretty bluntly that we are robbing God. Stealing from God is not something to be taken lightly. Many preachers cite this text about robbing God in the context of stewardship sermons. We rob God, they say, when we deny God what is rightfully God’s. We rob God, they say, when we fail to tithe, to make an offering of 1/10, or 10%, of our income. But it seems to me Malachi is more concerned about attitude than with particular actions like paying or not paying the biblical tithe.

Essentially, it comes down to our attitude about who owns what. If we believe (as most Americans seem to) that we have earned all we have, that we are entirely responsible for our prosperity, then we will have an ungenerous attitude toward everyone, including God. If we take a step back and realize that God is responsible for our well-being, we are more likely to be generous. The question is, “Who owns my possessions, bank account, and even my life?” To whom are we truly thankful for what we have?

Jesus told a story about a rich man who had a lot of stuff, so much stuff that he had to build a bigger barn for it all. When he had built the barn and stored the stuff, he sat back content. But just then God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” (Luke 12:20) Jesus’ point (and Malachi’s) is that we have no control over our possessions, our money, or our life. Anything and everything may be lost at any time. The truth is that we don’t own anything, not even ourselves. God owns it all.

When we fail to use it to benefit others around us, when we fail to hold it in trust for God with the proper attitude of generosity, we rob God. If, on the other hand, we use what we have to do what good we can, if we have an attitude of gratitude (the one we claimed we had yesterday), we will benefit as much as if not more than those around us. “Put me to the test and see,” says God.

So, today, what’s it to be? Rush off to the Black Friday sales putting Thanksgiving behind us, or rather making thanksgiving a way of life, not just a day on the calendar? Either way, we put God to the test . . . .

*An internet meme is a concept that spreads via the internet often taking the form of a captioned image.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Hostess Gifts For God – From the Daily Office – November 3, 2012

November 3, 2012 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Book of Ben Sira:

Do not appear before the Lord empty-handed,
for all that you offer is in fulfilment of the commandment.
The offering of the righteous enriches the altar,
and its pleasing odor rises before the Most High.
The sacrifice of the righteous is acceptable,
and it will never be forgotten.
Be generous when you worship the Lord,
and do not stint the first fruits of your hands.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Sirach 35:6-10 – November 3, 2012)

Host and Hostess Gifts It shouldn’t, but it always surprises me when I preside at a worship service and the offering of alms (cash money) is small. This is especially so at a small-attendance service when there are only a few people but even fewer dollars in the plate. It surprises me, I suppose, because of something I was taught by my grandfather. It shouldn’t surprise me, I suppose, because of the realities of which I am aware.

Those realities include the fact that many of those present have made their weekly or monthly pledge offerings at another time during the week, at a principal service or, perhaps, by mail or by direct deposit. Those realities include the fact that many people no longer carry cash at all and have no small bills or change to put in the alms basin. Those realities include the fact that many who give prefer to do so in a way that can be tracked for tax or other purposes and one cannot do that with “anonymous” cash donations. I know all these realities and yet, because of what my grandfather taught me, I am still surprised at how few alms there are in the offering basin.

What my paternal grandfather taught me accord’s with Ben Sira’s words in today’s lesson. He said, “Never approach the altar of God without a gift of thanksgiving. Even if you’ve already paid your pledge in some way, even if you’ve already attended the week’s principal service and made a major donation, open your wallet and give a little extra.” My grandmother always took a “hostess gift” when my grandparents were invited to dinner or another gathering at someone else’s home; I suppose, in some way, my grandfather’s insistence on an offering at worship was like a “hostess gift” to God. It is a visible act of thanksgiving and is as much a reminder to me as to anyone of my need to be thankful and generous. lt is much more for my benefit that I give than for that of the church or any mission or ministry it may support.

God doesn’t really need our hostess gifts, but we need to give them.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

It’s A Puzzlement! – From the Daily Office – September 19, 2012

September 19, 2012 / eric / 0 Comments

From Psalms:

Give the king your justice, O God,
and your righteousness to a king’s son.
May he judge your people with righteousness,
and your poor with justice.
May the mountains yield prosperity for the people,
and the hills, in righteousness.
May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,
give deliverance to the needy,
and crush the oppressor.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Psalm 72:1-4 (NRSV) – September 19, 2012)

Yul Brynner as the King of Siam in The King and I It’s a puzzlement!

In a recent online discussion of economic issues, a participant commented: “Government should not be charged with solving societal issues such as poverty, and this should be a society’s efforts to solve these problems through programs, charities, etc. sought by a willing group of individuals.” (I quote the comment as written; no editing.)

I don’t understand this compartmentalization of reality, this distinction of “government” as somehow separate from and different from “society”. I especially don’t understand it in a country whose founding document begins,

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

What is “society” if it is not “We the People”? And in our system of governance, the government, the sovereign, is also “We the People”. So how is it that “government” is distinct and different from “society” in the context of the United States of America? We the People decide by our votes who serves in “the government”. If we like the job they do, we vote them in again; if not, we vote them out. (There are a lot of people employed by “the government” who are not elected to it; but they are not “the government” — they are “government employees”. We can get rid of them, too, by voting out their elected bosses who are answerable to us.)

OK . . . so there’s that political framework puzzlement, but there’s also a religious puzzlement. Christian folk, especially conservative evangelical American Christian folk, love to pray the Psalms. Some of our most conservative brothers and sisters will allow no music in their worship other than the Psalms. So here we have a Psalm praying to God to give “the king” the power to “judge [God’s] poor with justice,” to “defend the cause of the poor,” to “give deliverance to the needy.” Later in the Psalm, “the king” is praised because he “delivers the needy when they call” (v. 12), he “has pity on the weak and the needy” and saves their lives (v. 13), he redeems their lives from oppression and violence (v. 14). In other words, he does all the things the participant in that conversation said the government shouldn’t do.

But the king was the government at the time the Psalms were written! We might be tempted to change king to president in an attempt to contextualize and modernize this Psalm to fit our American circumstance, but president would be the wrong word to substitute. The right word would be government. And an even more correct substitution would be We the People . . . for the king named in this Psalm was the sovereign and in our country We the People are the sovereign.

If we wish to pray this Psalm in our context, that would be the way to do it:

Give We the People your justice, O God,
and your righteousness to our children.
May We the People judge your people with righteousness,
and your poor with justice.
May the mountains yield prosperity for the people,
and the hills, in righteousness.
May We the People defend the cause of the poor of the people,
give deliverance to the needy,
and crush the oppressor.

Why the compartmentalization of life? Why the separation of government from society? Why the failure to see that what we revere in Holy Scripture, the righteousness prayed for the government in ancient Israel, ought to be our prayer for the government in modern America? Why the failure to see that it should be a prayer for ourselves? Why the refusal, as a society, as a nation, as the sovereigns of our nation’s government, to deliver the needy when they call, to have pity on the weak and the needy and save their lives, to redeem the lives of the poor from oppression and violence?

We the People are the society. We the People are the sovereign. We the People are the government. We the People are the ones called by this Psalm and charged by Holy Scripture with “solving societal issues such as poverty.” Why is this so difficult to comprehend?

As another king (a fictional one) was wont to say, “It’s a puzzlement!”

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

God’s in Control – From the Daily Office – September 18, 2012

September 18, 2012 / eric / 0 Comments

From John’s Gospel:

The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting,
“Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord – the King of Israel!.”

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – John 9:12-13 – September 18, 2012)

2008 Electoral Map We are living through a presidential election campaign in the United States. It seems to have been going on for ever, and the political ads and the news coverage of the candidates are increasing in intensity and in frequency. Pollsters take the public’s political pulse; commentators analyze the polls; the public reacts to the analysis; the pollsters re-poll the public. It’s a system of pendulum swings that feeds upon itself and oscillates back and forth. Flip-flopping candidates are matched by a flip-flopping electorate, and the candidates, their surrogates, and the commentators all decry the fickleness of the crowd.

But there is nothing new in a vacillating crowd, just look at today’s story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. In just a few days, without the help of 24/7 television news and the internet, the same crowd will be whipped into a frenzy demanding Jesus’ execution. In their eyes, Jesus will go from king to criminal in less than a week! They will move from “Hosanna!” to “Hang him!” in four days’ time! Talk about a rapidly swinging electoral pendulum!

Of course, at this point in the American electoral process opinions are pretty much hardened; our electoral choices are probably rock-solid by now. The candidates are courting a small portion of voters, the so-called “undecided”. This group makes up under 10% of the voting public: a recent Wall Street Journal poll says only 3% of voters haven’t decided who they will vote for, while Gallup places the number at 8% at the highest. In physics terms, I suspect, the “amplitude” of the political pendulum’s oscillations is very small.

It was larger in Jesus’ time. As told in the Gospels, the swing involved nearly the whole crowd of visitors (and residents) in Jerusalem, not just a small (under 10%) group of “undecided” Jews.

Here’s what I take away from a comparison of the Jerusalem crowd and the American electorate, and the outcome of their and our decisions . . . in the long run, they were not in control and, frankly, neither are we. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t care, shouldn’t decide as carefully and prayerfully as we can, shouldn’t take part in the electoral process, shouldn’t vote. We should do all those things! But we should do so in the faithful assurance that, in the long run, God is and will be in control. The “Jerusalem electorate” chose badly; God redeemed that decision and used its result for the salvation of the world. However we choose, whatever the short term result, in the long term God will use it.

Archbishop William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury during the Second World War, once said:

“While we deliberate, God reigns.
When we decide wisely, God reigns.
When we decide foolishly, God reigns.
When we serve God in humble loyalty, God reigns.
When we serve God self-assertively, God reigns.
When we rebel and seek to withhold our service God reigns –
The Alpha and the Omega, which is and which was,
And which is to come, the Almighty.”

So we should do our homework. We should study the issues, review the candidates, take part in the process, vote in the election. We should do so hopefully and, regardless of the outcome, we should not despair. In the end, whatever decision we make, God’s in control!

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Citizenship and Prayer – From the Daily Office – August 11, 2012

August 11, 2012 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Acts of the Apostles:

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Acts 4:32-35 – August 10, 2012)

This short passage from the Book of Acts describes the sort of world Jesus intended. Not just the sort of church . . . . the sort of world, the sort of human society, a complete community in which no one claims private ownership (it’s all God’s remember) and where there are no needy persons because what is needed is distributed equitably.

Dream world, right? Never gonna happen, you say? Then what do we mean when we say (some of us everyday, but a lot of at least once a week), “Our Father in heaven . . . your kingdom come”? If we don’t mean it, if we don’t want God’s kingdom to come, why do we keep asking for it? (Jesus taught this petition to his disciples when they asked him to teach them to pray. See Matthew 6:9–13 and Luke 11:2–4.)

I got into a beef in an on-line recently because another person attributed Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown’s criticism of his state’s Department of Transitional Assistance to his Christianity. Brown was upset because the department had mailed voter registration materials to some 400,000 welfare recipients; he interpreted this as a pro-Democratic-Party action by the department. (In fact, it was in compliance with a court order regarding the state’s failure to comply with “motor voter” regulations.) Nowhere in the article to which my correspondent referred was there any mention of Brown’s Christian faith (he is reportedly a member of the conservative Christian Reformed Church) by either Brown or the reporter. I objected to this person’s statement as a gratuitous and groundless comment, and a lengthy conversation ensued. (It was eventually and abruptly terminated by my correspondent.)

It got me thinking, though, about how we characterize the actions (political or otherwise) of other people and how in modern America we seldom hear positive actions (other than those expressly undertaken by the church) characterized as Christian! Programs which aid the poor, the elderly, the very young, or others in need are criticized as “socialist” even though that is precisely what the apostles set up in their first century community (long before, it should be noted, any western European economics theorist coined the term “socialist”). They are referred to as “entitlements”, a word often said with a sneer. If they are defended, it is on the grounds not of Christian practice but of some theory of economics or general ethics. The Constitutional separation of church and state, I suppose, is at work here. But for those who do support them and are Christians, if we really mean what we pray in the Lord’s Prayer (or any prayer of intercession for the poor and the needy for that matter), shouldn’t we applaud such programs as consonant with our faith? Shouldn’t we be giving and working toward their success because they are, in fact, elements of that world Jesus intended?

My staunchly Methodist grandfather taught me a number of things. A couple of them come to mind today. He taught me to never approach the altar of God without a gift of thanksgiving. Even if you’ve already made your weekly tithe (and he insisted that one give a tithe, a tenth of income), if you attend another prayer service give another offering. Those offerings, he said, are means by which God’s church carries out God’s work and answers at least some of our prayers. He taught me the same thing about taxes. I don’t know if he was familiar with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous statement, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society,” but that was certainly his attitude. He taught me that paying one’s taxes is the way the citizen enables the government to do the work it is created to do: the Preamble to our Constitution says that that is, among other things, to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Providing for the poor, the elderly, the very young, and other needy persons sure seems to me to fit in there.

Another thing he taught me was never to pray for something I was not willing to work for. If you pray for someone to be healed, be willing (and available when called upon) to care for that person. If you pray for war to be ended, be willing (and available when called upon) to do the work of creating peace.

That’s what prayer was to my grandfather: giving and working. I think that’s what citizenship was to him, as well. If everyone who prays “your kingdom come” actually gave and worked toward the kingdom’s appearance, if everyone also looked at their citizenship that way, I suspect that we’d hear a lot less criticism of “entitlements” and that the world would look a lot like what is described in that short bit from the Book of Acts.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

How Is It We Hear? – From the Daily Office – August 3, 2012

August 3, 2012 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Book of Acts:

“How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs – in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Acts 2:8-11 – August 3, 2012)

These are the words spoken by the great crowd of Jews and others who thronged the streets of Jerusalem for the Festival of Shavu’ot when the Twelve, empowered by the Holy Spirit, begin to tell the story of Jesus in languages they had never before spoken. Shavu’ot is a celebration with both agricultural and historical significance in Judaism. It is known as the “festival of the first fruits,” a harvest feast when the first fruits were brought as offerings to the Temple; it is also known as the “festival of the giving of the Law,” a celebration of the handing down of Torah on Mt. Sinai. It was called Pentecost, a Greek word meaning “fiftieth”, because it always falls on the fiftieth day after the Passover. That year it fell on the fiftieth day after the Resurrection and, thus, the Christian feast of the Holy Spirit carries that name, as well.

Twenty centuries later, the Jews still celebrate Shavu’ot and Christians still celebrate Pentecost, but what a different world we inhabit. Can we still find meaning in the notion of offering the first fruits to God? Does the giving the Law still have significance? And what of all those languages and the Apostles’ unprecedented immediate linguistic skill?

For us North American Christians an agricultural feast seems a distant and remote idyllic pastoral fantasy. We are no longer connected to the land. Our culture has moved away from an agrarian basis, through the industrial revolution, even beyond a manufacturing basis; we now live in what is being called a “service economy”. We no longer generally produce anything tangible! What are the “first fruits” of non-productive labor in a service economy? It just boils down to money, I guess.

And what about the myth (a word I use with no disrespect intended and with no suggestion that the story’s point is untrue) of God giving the stone tablets to Moses? In a time when that Law has been largely set aside by Christians and even many Jews – in a time when most people have separated the secular civil laws of everyday life from religious observance and custom – in a time when we conceive of the law as something made (“like sausage”) by a group of bickering, nasty, polarized, do-nothing elected officials – in such a time, how are we to give thanks for “the law”? Do we even want to?

Which leaves me to ponder that gift of languages? There are still plenty of them and there are more, in a sense, than ever before; even as actual, spoken tongues die out for lack of use, new means of communication arise – emoticons and email abbreviations have birthed tweets and hashtags – Facebook and LinkedIn and their ilk are the new “crowded streets” – night-time Twitter conversations are held by church people discussing ways “social media” can be used to spread the Gospel – tongues of flame seem to dance on computer monitors and laptops, on tablets and smartphones.

How is it we hear? How is it we understand? How is it we grasp the ancient truths of receiving the Law, the offering the first fruits, experiencing God’s deed of power? I’ve no doubt that hearing and understanding and comprehension are going on . . . but I often wonder if the church (the institution, not the people) is playing any part in that process of communication and comprehension. I hope and pray the Holy Spirit will alight upon us all and give us the gifts we need to do so, so that all may hear and understand in whatever “language” they best comprehend.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Bombast and Bluster: American Political Discourse – From the Daily Office – July 31, 2012

July 31, 2012 / eric / 1 Comment

From the Psalms:

Those of high degree are but a fleeting breath, *
even those of low estate cannot be trusted.
On the scales they are lighter than a breath, *
all of them together.
Put no trust in extortion;
in robbery take no empty pride; *
though wealth increase, set not your heart upon it.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Psalm 32:10-12, BCP versification – July 31, 2012)

WARNING: I reveal my politics in this post. If you don’t want to read about them, don’t continue!

There are no words that can adequately convey how thoroughly disgusted I am with the tone and content of political discourse in the United States of America as we approach the November 2012 elections. I make no bones of the fact that I am a liberal or a “progressive” as the Left now calls itself. My favorite senator is Bernie Sanders of Vermont. If there were a functioning Socialist Party in the US, I’d probably be a member. As it is, I’m an independent who tends to vote for Democrats, but frequently I find myself not voting for any standing candidate.

I am not one of those who goes in for the false equivalency of saying, “Both sides do it.” Yes, there are some on the Left who go overboard in their rhetoric, but in my estimation and opinion it is the Right, the Republican Party and the so-called Tea Party, who engage in the worst of the political nonsense. Much of what one finds on the internet coming from those quarters is racist and inflammatory; it is ill-informed; it is downright false and untrue. The words of our president or other Democrats are taken out of context and twisted completely away from their original meanings . . . the gullible, party-faithful fall for it and parrot it back without ever checking the facts. Statistics are distorted and history is ignored. It’s shameful!

But the worst of it all is the constant barrage of bombast in favor of continuing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans on the grounds that they are “job creators”! They are not! Money put into the pockets of people who already have plenty of money does not make its way into the marketplace. Money in the pockets of business owners does not encourage them to hire people. It is only money given to those who actually spend it, to the middle-class consumers who create product demand, that creates jobs. This is simple economics which our politicians are simply ignoring.

Which brings me to the admonitions of today’s Psalm: “Though wealth increase, set not your heart upon it.” Increasing the wealth of those of “high degree” who are “but a fleeting breath” is not the way to increase the prosperity of the people. It accomplishes none of the good we are to accomplish under the Law of Moses or the mandate of the Gospel! It does not further love of God nor of our neighbor. It does not feed the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked, nor heal the sick; it does not increase care of the widow or the orphan or the stranger who is in our land. It accomplishes nothing, not a shred of those things the Bible commends society to do. So long as our political discourse focuses only on questions of wealth and its increase, it serves no good purpose, whether it is the bombast of the Right or the bluster of the Left.

There are no words that can adequately convey how thoroughly disgusted I am with the tone and content of political discourse in the United States of America as we approach the November 2012 elections, but these will have to do: our political discourse does not honor God; it does not honor our neighbor; it does not honor our country. It is an embarrassment.

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Father Funston in the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Category: Economy (Page 3 of 5)

Something Is Wrong! Something Is Broken! – From the Daily Office – May 16, 2013

Economic Excrement, Financial Feces – From the Daily Office – May 13, 2013

Employers and Employees – From the Daily Office – January 25, 2013

Putting God to the Test – From the Daily Office – November 23, 2012

Hostess Gifts For God – From the Daily Office – November 3, 2012

It’s A Puzzlement! – From the Daily Office – September 19, 2012

God’s in Control – From the Daily Office – September 18, 2012

Citizenship and Prayer – From the Daily Office – August 11, 2012

How Is It We Hear? – From the Daily Office – August 3, 2012

Bombast and Bluster: American Political Discourse – From the Daily Office – July 31, 2012

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