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On the very first day of his ministry, Jesus went up to the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. Every eye was on him as he stood up to read. "Isn’t this Joseph and Mary’s son the carpenter?" they scoffed. I believe he could have read from any of the Hebrew scriptures. He could have read from Deuteronomy or Leviticus. He could have read "the thou shalts" and the "thou shalt nots." But he chose to open the old book of Isaiah the prophet and read what would be the keynote, not the footnote, of his ministry, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." I am not a great fan of conferences. I squirm and fidget and wonder what I’ll do when I’m released. But recently I found myself sequestered at a long and boring conference where the moderator said, "Find yourself a partner, someone you know, and talk about someone who is a hero to you-someone who is the inspiration for what you do." My first impulse was to say "Jesus" and they say you should always stick with your first impulse, but I worried that I would pick another clergyperson as a partner. Would they think I was self-righteous for choosing Jesus? Maybe I should talk about Cesar Chavez or Mother Jones. So I thought, "Isn’t it appropriate to talk about Jesus as a hero?" We speak of him as a savior and redeemer, but does it lessen or humanize him to speak of him as a hero? Then I had a breakthrough. I was in El Salvador not long ago with executives of The Gap Corporation touring their production facilities. I met with Father Dean Brackley, the director of the Oscar Romero Center at the Catholic University there. His office is only a few feet from the spot where eight Jesuit fathers, their housekeeper and her young daughter, were dragged from their beds in the middle of the night and slaughtered by the Salvadoran Army. The Pope had just been in El Salvador-a big event for a little country. I asked Father Brackley how the visit had gone. He shrugged and said, "The Pope is a fetish for people here, and the local bishops wrote his speech and you know what they’re like." The word that caught me off guard was "fetish"-that the Pope was not seen as a man, albeit a holy one, but that he was actually an "object of superstition with magical powers" (thanks to Webster). I must admit a few bells went off because too many Christians view Jesus, not as a man with a history and a message, but as a fetish, and object of superstition with magical powers. The danger here is that Christianity becomes a faith about Jesus instead of a faith of Jesus. The problem is that people are comfortable worshiping Jesus "out there" instead of having Jesus "in here." At Easter, Jesus becomes a sentimental memory instead of an enduring presence. The more we stereotype Jesus, the more we sentimentalize Jesus, the more we segregate Jesus, the more we put him out of reach. In our worst moments we want to keep Jesus-"out there." We want to keep him an emaciated figure nailed firmly to a cross. We want to keep him a little plastic statue safe up on our dashboards. We want to keep him six inches off the ground and a million miles away. Oh, we want him as a fetish in our time of need, but we don’t want him near us in our time of greed. As important as Jesus is to us as a redeemer and savior, is the fact that he was a man among us who taught us how to live. You see we want his power but not his advice. We want him as a fetish but not as a hero. Despite all the pedestals we put him on, Jesus of Nazareth was the most important teacher of moral and ethical principles in the history of the world…and that’s the part we run from. I used to hate that phrase, "gentle Jesus meek and mild." The people who wrote that never read the encounters with the Pharisees in the gospels, or even the arguments Jesus had with his mother. Jesus’ teaching was not some mindless set of rules which would get you into heaven. They are a blueprint for the living of a compassionate and meaningful life. More than anything else in his ministry, Jesus talked about the sin of the love of money. If you take a calculator and go through the gospels, by a two-to-one margin, more than divorce, more than adultery, more than blasphemy, more than hypocrisy, more than idolatry, Jesus teaches about economic justice for all God’s children. In fact, he forgave the blasphemous, he forgave the unbelievers, he even forgave some Romans. He forgave Peter his denial, he forgave Thomas his doubt; I even believe he would have forgiven Judas his betrayal, but when he saw the money changers in the temple, swindling the poor, that’s when his blood ran hot and his whip came down. Now, I am not an economist and neither are many of you. When I read about the American economy it seems that things are always going up and down. Housing starts are up, while soybean futures are down. The dollar is rising against the yen but falling against the peso. Mostly we read and our eyes glaze over. But two economic trends have to be of concern to people of faith. The first is income. The wages of the ordinary people who sit in our churches have been stagnant or moving backwards for the last 20 years, while everything else has been moving up. Second, the US now has the largest income disparity between rich and poor of any nation in the industrialized world. Ireland is a distant second. In 1975 the salary of a corporate CEO was 30 times the salary of the average worker, now it is 145 times that! Because of our nation’s philosophy on trade, taxes, immigration and foreign competition, and the growing concentration of corporate power, we are quickly moving toward a two-class society. Because of this philosophy over 100 million Americans, mostly working families and individuals, are being treated as though they were disposable. What was once the world’s largest, growing middle class is now shrinking. The descendants of American pioneers, who fled the tyranny of aristocracy and two-tiered societies, are finding themselves moving steadily toward an economically separate, and unequal nation. How do we claim to preach "good news to the poor" if we don’t try to understand what is happening to them? So, some time ago, a group of pastors in New York City started "People of Faith" as a national network of congregationally based clergy and lay people concerned about our daily bread and our racial justice issues. The New York Times recently called it "a ragtag guerrilla army of religious activists"-which suits us just fine. Before we were even organized, word came to us from friends in Central America about the terrible conditions in a maquiladora factory (a factory where only labor is added to the production process) used by several US clothing companies. Many of the hundreds of young girls in the plant were underage, some as young as thirteen. The factory was brutally hot, the drinking water was dirty, the supervisors were sexually abusive, the girls were allowed only two short bathroom breaks a day and many were forced to take birth control pills. Even with all this, the most unpopular feature to the girls was "forced overtime." When a big order came in, it often meant twenty-hour shifts, from seven in the morning until two in the morning. Many girls went to work to make money (very hard at fifty cents an hour) so that they might complete high school in night classes. With forced overtime, if they went to class and refused to work the long shift, they were fired and placed on a computerized "black list" shared with other companies. They would never work again in the garment industry, which was often the only game in town. Working with trade union and human rights activists, we raised these questions with The Gap, a major US company using the Mandarin International factory in El Salvador. They denied all the charges and said they checked the plant regularly. A war of words raged but the evidence was mounting-against The Gap. As all seemed lost, we mailed out an appeal to our People of Faith network, still in its infancy. Now pastors, rabbis, priests, sisters and lay people, consumers all, wanted to hear from The Gap why it couldn’t police it own sub-contractors. One rabbi on the West Side of Manhattan got frustrated after writing two letters and receiving double-talk replies. In a third letter Rabbi Rolando Matalon, leader of the large B’nai Jeshrun congregation, himself a survivor of Argentina’s dirty war, wrote The Gap that if they were not forthcoming with plans to change their corporate policy with regard to these factories, he would announce to his congregation that "holiday shopping at The Gap was a violation of the Jewish ethical law." That letter was one of hundreds, but it was a beauty. Two weeks later, senior Gap executives were on a plane to New York, not to meet with captains of industry but to meet with the clergy. After several false starts, we met together with the Gap officials, not at the University Club, not at a fancy New York hotel, but in the parlor of the house of Dr. Paul Smith, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, NY. An agreement was signed that called for the strict compliance of sub-contractors with the Gap corporate code; the re-hiring of workers fired for union activity, and the implementation of a team of independent human rights workers on the ground in El Salvador to watchdog conditions in the plant and to give the young workers someone they could speak to without fear of reprisal. Our involvement was such a little thing; a letter, a phone call or a visit-but when multiplied by the hundreds, it persuaded a major US corporation to change its policy. Many say of Jesus, "Oh, he’s my Lord and Savior." Not many say "He’s my hero." Many people want to worship Jesus, not many want to be like Jesus. If you are going to be serious and not phony about an encounter with the risen Jesus, then you will learn how to hold him in your heart and not wear him on your sleeve. Because God is not finished with us-we are a work in progress and we need work every single day. Whenever I get tempted to relax, I remember the story of the gardener. He had a rocky, barren piece of hillside, but he went to work and made an investment of love in that old tired ground. And he raked and he hoed and he dug and he planted. He nursed along those flowers and those shrubs like they were his babies. Then along came his pious friend who looked at the garden and admired it and said, "Isn’t it wondrous what the Lord can do with a piece of land?" The gardener shook his head and said, "Maybe you should have seen it when it was the Lord’s." God gives us the raw materials, and things happen in this life by grace but not by accident. It takes nurture and cultivation-it takes role models and heroes-but let’s not forget the hero we have always had but too often ignore. What did Martin Luther say?
Let us pray. Oh God, from compromise and things half-done keep us with stern and stubborn pride. And when at last our fight is won, Lord, keep us still unsatisfied. Amen Note: Dyson is currently involved with "People of Faith" a national congregationally based coalition of activists concerned with the downward shifting of the tax burden, the erosion of environmental and worker protection, the steady increase in class and regional inequalities, huge cuts in education and health programs and the continued scourges of racism and poverty. For further information, contact: People of Faith |
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The Rev.
David Dyson