Word Made Flesh [cross-post]

Word Made Flesh

by William H. Willimon

It’s a story so strange we could not have dreamed it up by ourselves, this story of how God was incarnate in Jesus the Christ. An embarrassing pregnancy, a poor peasant couple forced to become undocumented immigrants in Egypt soon after the birth of their baby, King Herod’s slaughter of the Jewish boy babies in a vain attempt to put an end to this new “King,” From the beginning the story of Jesus is the strangest story of all. A Messiah who avoids the powerful and the prestigious and goes to the poor and dispossessed? A Savior who is rejected by many of those whom he sought to save? A King who reigns from a bloody cross? Can this one with us be God?

And yet Christians believe that this story, for all its strangeness, is true. Here we have a truthful account of how our God read us back into the story of God. This is a truthful depiction not only of who God really is but also of how we who were lost got found, redeemed, restored, and saved by a God who refused to let our rejection and rebellion (our notorious “God problem”) be the final word in the story.

Jesus the Christ (“Christ” means “Messiah,” “The Anointed One”) was a human being, a man who was born in a human family, attended parties (he was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard by his critics), moved constantly around the area of Galilee, ran afoul of the governmental and religious authorities, taught through short, pithy stories (“parables”), did a number of surprising and utterly inexplicable “signs and wonders,” and eventually was tortured to death in a horribly cruel form of capital punishment which the Romans used against troublesome Jews and rebellious trouble makers. A few days later Jesus’ astonished followers proclaimed to the world that Jesus had been raised from the dead and had returned to them, commissioning them to continue his work. (This aspect of the story has always been somewhat of a reach for those who prefer their gods to be aloof, ethereal, and at some distance from the grubby particularities of this world.)

While these are roughly the historical facts of Jesus from Nazareth, as is so often the case, the raw facts don’t tell the whole story. From the first many knew that Jesus was not only a perceptive, challenging teacher (“rabbi,” teacher, was a favorite designation for Jesus) but was also uniquely God present (“Emmanuel,” means “God with us”). In a very short time Paul (whose letters are the earliest writings in the New Testament) could acclaim crucified and resurrected Jesus as the long awaited Messiah, the Christ, the one who was the full revelation of God. Jesus was not only a loving and wise teacher; Jesus was God Almighty doing something decisive about the problems between us creatures and the Creator.

This is the story we Christians name as “Incarnation.” It is a strange, inexplicable story that we happen to believe is true, the story that explains everything, the key to what’s going on between us and God. It is the story that we encounter each year at Advent, that season of reflection and penitence before Christmas.

It’s Advent. The church gives us the grace of four Sundays to get ourselves prepared for the jolt of once again being encountered by the Word made flesh, God with us.

Happy Advent.
William Willimon

"Open and Affirming Because of the Bible" [cross-post]

Open and Affirming Because of the Bible

by Hugh Hollowell

I want to start by saying that any time there are two people with opposing views concerning a third group of people, the resulting conversation will involve much audacity, hubris and privilege. That I am given a platform to speak here is a sign of that privilege, and I hope to be a good steward of it. For all the ways I will screw that up, I want to apologize to my LGBT sisters and brothers in advance.
It’s against my nature to spend a lot of time in arguments – they seldom do anything to convince the other and serve to fuel the fires of the already converted. So, this post, while written as a result of the previous post on gay marriage, should not be seen as an argument with the author of that post.

Rather, what I hope to do is present an alternative view of how, to use that author’s term, Biblical Christianity can be used to shape a worldview that is not only open but affirming.


Our differing views, I think, come down to how one views scripture: Is the Bible a book where we seek precedents or a book where we find principles?

You can make a much stronger textual case against woman preaching or divorce or in favor of slavery or women being submissive than you can against same gender relationships. Each time we have faced one of these issues, we have thought it prudent to disregard Biblical precedent in favor of Biblical principle.

Today, we cisgender Christians face a similar question to the one faced by the Apostle Paul – How do we act toward the follower of Christ who is outside our own category?

For Paul, the question involved circumcision – could a male with a foreskin be a faithful and fully included member of the body? The Jewish leadership of the church said no, but Paul argued for a “circumcision of the heart” – that it was the intent and inner actions of the believer that made a person a follower of the Christ and not a matter of their belonging to a given category.

To Paul, their identity as a follower of the Christ trumped all other categories. Paul believed this revelation to be at the heart of the good news of the Christ – that we no longer regard anyone from a human point of view, but that God, through Christ, has reconciled the world unto God.

Paul said that anything less than full inclusion of all Christians was wrong. He argued this in Jerusalem to the 12, and he again in several of his letters, most famously in Galatians. In Christ, he said, there is no longer slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female, we are all one in Christ Jesus. If, as he says in Romans, there is nothing that can come between us and the love of God, would Paul limit himself with only those categories? What categories are stronger than the love of God?

My understanding of Biblical Christianity leads me to believe that all Christians are my brother and my sister – whether black or white, gay or straight, transgendered or cisgendered. ALL are one in Christ Jesus.

So, I can hear the author of the previous post ask, where is our sexual ethic to be found? In Biblical principle, not precedent. Jesus tells us to love our neighbor and to do to others what we want done to us. Is cheating on my partner wrong? Yes, because it is not how I would wish to be treated, and it is not loving toward my partner. It has nothing to do with my or my potential bedmate’s genitals.

Is having sex with a child wrong? Yes, because the child cannot consent, and thus it is an occasion of of power and coercion, neither of which is loving or how we would wish to be treated. Are two people (of any gender or orientation) having mutually consenting sex as an expression of their love and commitment wrong? It is loving and how I want my sexual relationships to work, so no, it is not.

I know this will not satisfy those who want to pick the Bible apart for rules and regulations, but that’s nothing new – Jesus talked about those who strained gnats and swallowed camels, who focused on letters instead of spirit and intent.

In short, I feel, as a result of Biblical principle and conscience, that to be less than fully inclusive is to participate in less than the fullness of the Gospel. In my reading of scripture, to actively oppose the full inclusion of LGBT Christians is an act that is less than Christian. In fact, I would argue that when we erect categories that preclude people from fully participating in the life of the church (and marriage is part of the life of the church) we are working against the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God on earth and we deny the very testimony of the resurrection of Christ.

Now, I am the first to admit that this might not convince you. I understand. But if so, ask yourself a few questions: Would you rather be on the side of love or on the side of power? If you have to face your God over this question, is God really going to condemn you for privileging love? If you are married, and I told you the only way you could be fully right with and love God was to leave your partner and be celibate forever, would you see that as Good News?

Neither do they.


—-
Hugh Hollowell is an activist, a speaker and a Mennonite minister. He’s the founder and director of Love Wins 
Ministries where he pastors a congregation made up largely of people who are homeless.

God is Starting to Show [cross-post from Christian Century]

CENTURY BLOGS

God is starting to show

Nov 29, 2011 by Donna Schaper

God is starting to show.

Usually an upcoming birth doesn't start to show till the end of the first trimester. Before that, the life in us is so small that it creates no bulges. Many women can wear their regular clothes and get their regular sleep, give or take a few gastrointestinal disturbances.

Then comes the bulge, the ballooning, the sense of no longer being one's own person, the sense that something important is happening within us. We find people staring at our bellies. The bulge has locked into place; it is attaching itself firmly to us.

Advent is the season of the showing, and God is starting to show. We light one candle to indicate the coming of a new kind of light. We see the bulge in our hearts, and we know things are different. Sometimes we even say, "This year will be different," not knowing exactly what we mean besides the sure knowledge of growth in us.

We want God's spirit to firmly attach to us, and we know it will have to move slowly--otherwise we will be much too scared. One candle each week is about the right pace to comprehend the matter.

At the core of our Christian faith is the Holy Spirit having mysterious relations with a girl. This core mystery results in a child who is understood to be the salvation of the world. Advent is the time when we get on the path of understanding what Mary wonders: "How can these things be?" How come God comes down? How come God gets small? How come God, the eternal, becomes the temporal?

How can God be so dependent on us for care? What if we do something wrong?

In our story, power is vulnerability, heavenly is earthly, flesh involves spirit and divinity caresses the ordinary. Our God is is very hard to fathom in a world of tacky Christmas ornaments and deep concerns about Christmas-season retail performance. Our story has a quarrel with the world as we know it. It sings its song in a different key, the key of incarnation, of spirit becoming flesh and dwelling among us.

Not above us, but among us. Not outside us, but in us. Not robed in kingly crimson but in swaddling clothes in the manger next door. Not quick, but slow, slow enough not to scare us and to fully attach to us inside.

From the UCC Network: 11/30/2011 "Magic Tricks"

Magic Tricks

Mark 3:22

"The religion scholars from Jerusalem came down spreading rumors that he was working magic, using devil tricks to impress them with spiritual power."

Reflection by Lillian Daniel 

Recently I attended a clergy conference where a remarkably talented presenter from Cambridge University was not only talking about theology and music, but would periodically sit down in the middle of his lecture at a grand piano and actually play the piece in question, from memory, with the skill of a Carnegie Hall star. On top of that, he had a cool British accent. It felt like he was cheating. Of course, I was jealous of his gifts. Spare this Anglican priest who's good at everything.

God is so not a Communist when it comes to apportioning talent. And I think our denomination needs to pass a resolution correcting God on that, because that's how we roll.

I was already feeling insecure that day because we had these Christian magicians coming to my church for a Wednesday night program, and they're not only magicians but also ordained Methodist clergy. And I could just hear my members saying, "Ok, Lillian, what special thing can you do? "

And I had to say "Look, I'm sorry, but there are just way more requirements to becoming a Methodist minister."

I mean, Rachmaninoff - playing Anglicans, Bible-based Methodist magicians — it all just makes you feel inadequate. And when that happens, it's easy to get accusatory.

That's what happened with Jesus. He was doing good things in the world, he was healing and teaching, but the people accused him of doing magic tricks and working with the devil.

Prayer

Dear God, help me to see your Holy Spirit at work in the gifts and talents of others, and keep those demons of petty jealousy at bay. Amen.

About the Author Lillian Daniel is the senior minister of the First Congregational Church, UCC, Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She is the author, with Martin Copenhaver, of This Odd and Wondrous Calling: the Public and Private Lives of Two Ministers.

From the UCC Network: "Telling it Like it Is" 11/29/2011

Telling it Like it Is

Psalm 79:12

"Pay back our neighbors seven times over, right where it hurts, for the insults they used on you, Lord." 

Reflection by Anthony B. Robinson

The 79th Psalm is pretty raw stuff. There's this verse, telling God it's "payback time." There are cries for vengeance and divine wrath.

As Advent begins and our thoughts turn to mangers, Bethlehem, and choirs of angels, this psalm seems, at best, discordant. There's not a thing about it that's pretty or sweet.

Such raw, desperate prayer was prompted by the violation of all that was holy. The Temple had been desecrated and destroyed. The people have been slaughtered. ("They've left your servants' bodies as food for the birds" v. 2). Their enemies gloat.

There's a tendency in the church, perhaps particularly in a season like Advent, to censor out such realities and such raw emotions. Church becomes a place to be polite and on our best behavior or to be only upbeat and happy.

While acting on the feelings expressed by this Psalm can be a mistake, it is also a mistake to censor them from our experience and from our faith. What is holy is violated daily in our world. Children are abused and neglected. Lives are tossed on the scrap heap of unemployment. Once lovely neighborhoods are turned to ugly wastelands. People with power use it to feather their own nest, not to serve the common good.

A faith that does not tell it like it is, that does not reckon with evil, risks becoming sentimental and irrelevant, especially in this present time.

So, while I don't find Psalm 79 to be easy reading or praying, I am grateful for it. I am grateful for a faith that is honest enough to tell it like it is and to submit the truth, along with our feelings of outrage and betrayal, to God.

Prayer

We confess, Holy One, sometimes we bring you only our noble, cleaned-up selves. We are grateful that what you desire is our real, our uncensored, selves. Grant that our prayers may be honest and our faith real. Amen.

About the Author Anthony B. Robinson, a United Church of Christ minister, is a speaker, teacher and writer. His newest book is Stewardship for Vital Congregations, published by The Pilgrim Press. Read his weekly reflections on the current lectionary texts at www.anthonybrobinson.com/ by clicking on Weekly Reading.

Occupy in Exile: Sacred Space is Everywhere [cross-post]

Occupy in Exile: Sacred Space is Everywhere

• By DONNA SCHAPER

• 
  It's not about the stuff...
• Donna Schaper
  The Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper is Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York City and author, most recently, of Sacred Chow: Holy Ways to Eat.
• If you want to find the Occupy Movement now, just go here: exile, diaspora, online, viral, on radio, at Thanksgiving tables, over coffee, in Los Angeles and Poughkeepsie and Riverside and more. Everybody wants to know where it is—and it is everywhere.
  On Monday night, November 14, 2011, the mayor of New York City ordered the police to evict the 500 or so overnight occupiers in Zuccotti Park. As part of the eviction, tents and computers, books and papers, food and toilet paper were destroyed, actually ground fine in dumpsters. Many falsely thought the movement wouldn’t survive its physical eviction and material destruction. They were and are wrong.
  Sacred space may start with tents and have a middle stage in church buildings, even sanctuaries. But sacred space has no need of one place. It can occupy many at the same time. They did not destroy all the books in the Occupy library. Some of those books are being retrieved at the New York Police Department “lost and found.” Sacred space is not one place; and you can grind a book to dust but not destroy it.
  Judson Memorial Church opened our church’s assembly room for five nights the first week and still have an astonishing collection of notebooks, backpacks, sleeping bags and down comforters, sweaters, sweatshirts, and mittens hanging out in our hallways. We think people may pick this stuff up but we aren’t completely sure. The stuff is heartwrenching—but not nearly as heartwrenching as the demands about who has stuff and who doesn’t, who lives in a tent and who doesn’t, who has financial security and who doesn’t. This matter is larger than any stray mitten or powerful moment.
  People love to stay immune from the connections between the sacred and the profane, holy space and “regular” space, tented space and the well-appointed space of a mansion. They try to tell us that politics and religion never meet. Or that money is “dirty” and therefore can get away with its meanness. Deliverance from these false dichotomies is our greatest need as a country. Money is holy and just and good when used for holy and just and good purposes. It is not “dirty” and therefore the property of those naughty boys of Wall Street.
  Sacred Space is also never just one place or in one time. Zucotti was a beginning space, not an ending space. Deliverance from the dichotomy of sacred space and scattered space is also important to the movement as it matures in diaspora. Consider first the way in which too many Christians, Jews, and Muslims have imagined the city of Jerusalem as their privately or parochially owned sacred space. Or consider the fight about Ground Zero, a place considered so sacred by some that they found the possibility of a mosque near the site as desacralizing. The blend, not the division, of sacred and profane spaces really matters to justice and its hopes.
  If the spirit of Occupy Wall Street and its home at “Liberty Square” is to survive and have impact, we occupiers need a larger understanding of what sacred space is and what it isn’t. Sacred space can be anywhere, any time.
  Lots of people want to turn this yearning for holy uses of money into a fight between cops and people or pepper spray and meeting rooms. When sacred space is distorted into private property, sacred space rigidifies in ways that make the fights between people small. Here it could make the police into our enemy when actually they are part of the 99%. Occupy need not be anywhere to achieve its objectives. In fact, the more everywhere it is, the better. You can occupy everywhere, as long as your original purpose is something larger than one place. You can also get stuck anywhere, if your purpose is to stay in one place as though it was yours.
  When sacred space is opened and understood to be anywhere, any time, you can occupy a tent or a street corner and still tell a story about economic justice.

Prophets Everywhere [cross-post]

BLOGGING TOWARD SUNDAY (from the Christian Century)

Prophets everywhere

Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8

Nov 28, 2011 by Bill Goettler

For more commentary on this week's readings, see the Reflections on the Lectionary page, which includes Goettler's current Living by the Word column as well as past magazine and blog content. For full-text access to all articles, subscribe to the Century.

As the second Sunday in advent approaches, I find the prophets of the season compelling. To my ears, their message sounds pretty consistent: "Change the ways of this world."

Sometimes I want to pretend that there are no more prophets, that the prophetic word is locked into the biblical era. But them I'm reminded of the guy on my own porch, of the pesky peace activists who insist on gathering on Mondays night in the park downtown, of the little church on the other side of town where parishioners open the doors every single night of the week to combat the gun violence in our city. And I can't help but contrast those responses with my own meager Christmas preparations, with our focus on inspiring worship and special offerings and church order.

There is good reason for all of those things, of course. Faithful worship, generous giving and institutional well-being all matter in the realm of God. But so does the kind of discomfort that John presents us with. To paraphrase the old bumper sticker: If you aren't uncomfortable, you aren't paying attention. A cozy Christmas fails to take the gospel seriously enough. In Advent especially, I feel the need to counter the culture that pretends that all is right with the world.

After all, we know better--as John makes very clear.

The prophets are everywhere, if we will but pay attention. Their call to transformation cannot be ignored. And this, more than any other Sunday, is the week to preach about it.

From the UCC Network: "Peaceful Presents" 11/28/2011

Peaceful Presents

Micah 4:3

"…they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks…" 

Reflection by Quinn G. Caldwell

A beautiful image, but it's a lot more complicated than it sounds. I mean, let's say that an Israelite doesn't need his sword any more. What then?  Go home, pull out the ol' hammer and anvil from the basement, and do a DIY repurposing of those old decommissioned weapons?

Probably not. You'd have to go to a blacksmith. Who, let's face it, could make more money beating plowshares into swords, war being so profitable and all. So you'd also have to convince him to put off other business to take yours. Which would probably require getting together a bunch of people who agree with you and proving to him that plows are profitable by spending your money on them.

If you really want swords beaten into plowshares you're going to have to work. You're going to have to pay and organize. You're going to have to convince other people, people like you and people who run businesses that do stuff that you can't do yourself, that peace is profitable.

Start with your Christmas list. Choose gifts that are made of renewable resources; that use less plastic (and therefore less oil); that are made by companies that are not also defense contractors. Come up with your own list of requirements for peaceful presents. Ask others for similar gifts.

It won't be enough to get Raytheon into the plow business, but it will be a start.

Prayer

God, I believe in your coming realm of peace. Help me to make it real—and profitable. Amen.

About the Author Quinn G. Caldwell is Associate Minister of Old South Church in Boston, Massachusetts, and co-editor, with Curtis J. Preston, of the  Unofficial Handbook of the United Church of Christ.

Micah 4:1-5 - 11/28/2011

He Will Teach Us How to Live

"1 But when all is said and done, God's Temple on the mountain, Firmly fixed, will dominate all mountains, towering above surrounding hills. People will stream to it 2 and many nations set out for it, Saying, "Come, let's climb God's mountain. Let's go to the Temple of Jacob's God. He will teach us how to live. We'll know how to live God's way." True teaching will issue from Zion, God's revelation from Jerusalem. 3 He'll establish justice in the rabble of nations and settle disputes in faraway places. They'll trade in their swords for shovels, their spears for rakes and hoes. Nations will quit fighting each other, quit learning how to kill one another. 4 Each man will sit under his own shade tree, each woman in safety will tend her own garden. God-of-the-Angel-Armies says so, and he means what he says. 5 Meanwhile, all the other people live however they wish, picking and choosing their gods. But we live honoring God, and we're loyal to our God forever and ever."   Micah 4:1-5


If ever there was a time for prophecy fulfillment, it appears to be now. Wars raging on several fronts, and all we seem to have are national elected leaders who wish to perpetuate the killing and destruction of others. And here at home we are engaged in our own war - the war of the economy. Economic classes pitted against each other, while millions are falling farther into debt and despair everyday, struggling with how to survive and care for their family and loved ones. And jobs are as scarce as ever, while political parties vie for re-election and tote the party-line at all costs towards those whom they have been elected to care for through the political process.


Where and when does it end? When will we see the day when our values and concerns are for our neighbor, instead of sole for ourselves? When will the word "profit" come to mean the welfare of all persons everywhere, and not just how fat our wallet or investment portfolio is today? 


Rifles turned to agricultural tools.
Humvees to water purification systems.
Forward operating bases to schools and hospitals.
Attack choppers to Medivac choppers.
Industries of death into industries of life - and life-giving jobs.


Where and when will the citizens of earth take refugee God - in the teachings of the Creator of all life? 


When and where will we turn from what is destroying us to that which can bring peace and life to everyone - everyone?


The Lord of All waits for us to reach for the truth that God holds out to us, and then to follow those ways into a new world; a world for which our hearts and souls long.

The Church and the Solution [cross-post]

Naked Theology

The Church and the Solution

My name is Brian McLaren, and I approved this title.

By Brian McLaren, November 11, 2011

"Like" the Patheos Progressive Christian Page on Facebook to receive today's best commentary on Progressive Christian issues.

I have a reputation for choosing ungainly titles, so my titles are often replaced by editors with better taste or judgment. Such was the case with a piece I wrote recently for Patheos on seminaries.

My main point was that seminaries are succeeding at producing energetic, engaged, educated, and creative young leaders who too often step from the high-speed train of seminary education into the brick wall of change-averse, socially dysfunctional, spiritually constricted first assignments. I can't remember what my original title was, but I know it wasn't "Seminary is Not the Problem—the Church Is."

I don't like using "the Church" as a generalization. I don't even like using the term "Christianity." Whatever "the Church" and "Christianity" may be, the actual churches and Christians I know - and I've spoken in many hundreds of churches in my travels, to lots and lots of Christians - are so diverse and idiosyncratic as to defy broad categorization. I try to avoid making even more limited generalizations - about "those Evangelicals," or "those Mainliners," or "those Catholics." I lean toward speaking of "Christianities" instead of "Christianity," because the differences among the different Christian tribes and kindreds often seem greater than the differences between some of them and other religions entirely.

Beyond that, I think "the Church" receives more than its share of critique, and critique can cross a line where it resembles beating a dead horse (not to compare the church to a dead horse).

Besides, some churches and Christianities actually thrive on being criticized; each critique feeds into a victim narrative and solidifies an identity as an oppressed minority, misunderstood by "the world" but valiantly faithful to God. Other churches and Christianities have been pushed by excessive critique into a survival narrative, where they seem to acquiesce, "Yes, we're a mess, we're declining, we're dysfunctional, and we're doomed, but we're just holding on a little longer." Still other churches respond to critique with aggressive counter-attack, adopting a revenge narrative, clicking into a kind of spiritual adrenaline rush where they'll show the rest of us who God's elect is: "Criticize us, will you? We'll show you!"

I have no desire to push any of my fellow Christians further into any of these narratives.

Yes, I do meet too many young leaders who have been damaged, even savaged, by the dysfunctional churches I wrote about in my seminary column. But I also meet amazing, wonderful, thriving church leaders and vibrant, beautiful, encouraging congregations. I don't know what the exact percentages are, but my hunch is that this Sunday, more churches will be moving into the latter category than a year ago, and next year, more will be there than today.

Under the guise of "ministry as usual," positive things are afoot. I feel it. I believe it.

I felt it a few weeks ago in my home church on a typical Sunday. The music was good, as usual, and the sermon was thought-provoking and inspiring, as usual. The prayers were solid and meaningful, as usual, and the people were warm and welcoming, as usual. What stood out for me was the family seated next to me, a dad, a mom, a daughter, and a son whom I didn't recognize. Based on the boy's movements and the attentions given him by his mother and sister, the son seemed to have some form of autism, maybe Asperger's syndrome.

His foot and leg were bouncing almost constantly, calming only momentarily when his mother gently touched his knee, which she did every five or ten minutes. Before and after communion, he crossed himself repeatedly. He sang with more enthusiasm than musical ability, but if one must choose, that's the one to have.

The moment that really touched me came at the offering.

He didn't have money, but when I handed him the basket, he bowed toward it. At first I thought he was reverencing the basket as if it were an icon or some other holy thing. But then he leaned forward even more, placing the basket on his knees and nearly touching his forehead into the checks, bills, and envelopes inside. His family didn't intervene, as if this were his normal routine. Then he sat up again and handed the basket to his mother.

Suddenly, it dawned upon me: he was putting himself in the offering basket, diving in head-first, if you will. And this must be what he does every week, his own self-made ritual.

And at that moment, I was awash in a baptism of grace.

Yes, there are many things in our churches that are easy targets for criticism. Yes, some of our churches and some of our Christianities are part of the problem. But be careful, as the old parable says (Matthew 13:24-30): if you try to pull up all the weeds, you'll dislodge some of the wheat too . . . the tender shoots of faith and devotion growing up in truly important people like that special boy.

I feel it week after week, speaking in congregations across the country that include people so sincere and bright and ready to go that you can't care how many or few they are, how rich or poor, how old or young, or how influential or marginal. You just know that people like this have what our world needs, that they're part of the solution. You know that their spark is going to catch fire and spread, and that what is in them—faith, hope, love, wisdom, humility—can heal what ails us, and will heal it, as long as they don't lose heart.
Which is why I didn't want to let my previous post with its potentially discouraging title go unchallenged.

Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is an ecumenical global networker among innovative Christian leaders. Among McLaren's more prominent writings are A New Kind of Christian (2001), A Generous Orthodoxy (2006), Everything Must Change (2009), and A New Kind of Christianity (2010). His lastest book, Naked Spirituality, offers "simple, doable, and durable" practices to help people deepen their life with God.


McLaren's column, "Naked Theology," is published every Tuesday on the Progressive Christian portal. Subscribe via email or RSS.

POVERTY AMID PLENTY – AMERICA’S CONTINUING SHAME [cross-post]

POVERTY AMID PLENTY – AMERICA’S CONTINUING SHAME

The current wave of mass protest against Wall Street excess has completely reframed the public conversation in the United States.  The “deficit problem” with which Washington was consumed in the first half of 2011 has not vanished from the political agenda, but its resolution will now have to be achieved against the background of a growing understanding of the sheer scale of current income and wealth inequality. If the Republicans in Congress have their way, the politicians may yet cut entitlements programs for the poor while declining to raise taxes on the rich. But if that is how the deficit problem is eventually resolved, that resolution will be more extensively recognized as class-biased in its character and impact than would have been the case before the OWS protests began. The super-rich are invisible no more, and are now being held to account.

Even the Congressional Budget Office has recently joined the fray, publishing last week Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007. The CBOreported rises in the average real after-tax household income of the top one percent of the U.S. population of 275% between the two dates, as against a rise of 65 percent for the top 20 percent of income earners, just under 40% for the top 60 percent of income earners, and a tawdry 18 percent rise for the bottom 20 percent.[1] All the resulting headlines focused in on that top one percent and its staggering 275 percent gain in income.  “Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds,” was the ruling headline in The Washington Post in the immediate wake of the report.[2]  “Incomes rising fastest at the top” was the headline on October 19’s EPI Economic Snapshot.[3] “Another word for what’s been happening might be theft” was the way Eugene Robinson put it in his opinion piece in that same Washington Post.[4]

All that is true of course, but even so a word of caution is in order. Though fully justified by the data in the report, those headlines help frame the public conversation in ways that might yet leave progressive forces vulnerable to rapid pushback. For by focusing on the super-rich, such headlines leave their authors (and us) open to the counter-argument that since 2007 trends have been reversed – that the rich are no longer as excessively rich as they once were, and so are correspondingly less in need of punitive taxation than was originally the case. By focusing on the CBO Report, the headlines also open us to the argument that even the bottom 20 percent of American income earners are becoming steadily better off – so why make a fuss if their entitlements programs are now marginally eroded in the name of a wider American need for fiscal restraint?

We can expect both responses. Indeed both are already underway. The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner recently argued that in the wake of the 2008 recession “the rich are earning a smaller proportion of U.S. income” than before, and that “interestingly, the decline in earnings by the rich has corresponded with higher unemployment and rising poverty overall. We are all poorer,” Tanner said, “but at least we are more equally poor. Hooray.”[5] That response should not surprise us.  Commentators on the Right have long argued that tax data fails to accurately measure income and wealth inequality in the United States, and invariably overstates the riches of those at the top of income and wealth tables.[6] Some have also long argued that the American poor are not really poor. They are not as poor as the income data would suggest, because fiscal transfers (earned income tax credits and the like) offset much of that poverty.[7] They are not poor by historical standards – they live better now than many middle class families did two/three generations ago. They are not poor when compared to the genuinely poor in the global economy: the American poor have cars, fridges, televisions, cell-phones and often generous living space – things that are still not available to the emerging middle class in many developing societies even now, let alone to the third world poor.[8] And if some Americans are poor when measured against official U.S. poverty standards, then much of that poverty is self-induced. Had the young single mothers now trapped on welfare only stayed at school, got a job and delayed having children until they were financially secure, they could easily have slipped into the bottom rungs of the American middle class.[9] So at least many conservatives regularly argue!

If that dismissal of American poverty is not to hold sway, we need to go beyond the statistics in the CBO Report, to say other things about the American rich and the American poor. One thing we need to say is that – as the CBO Report indicates – both the rich and the poor are still with us. The poor have not gone away, and their conditions of life remain seriously impaired when compared to those enjoyed by the rich. Another thing we need to say – following Eugene Robinson – is that there are poor Americans primarily because there are also rich Americans. The rich and the poor in contemporary America are not separate categories of people, unconnected and dissimilar. Instead the two categories are organically linked: linked because the rich and the poor are ultimately just people sharing a common country and economy; and linked because in a world of scarce resources, the excessive claims of the privileged deny full access to those resources by the less privileged. In a very real sense, the pursuit of rising incomes in contemporary America is a zero-sum game – if the man in the big office takes a big salary hike, that hike leaves less in the salary pool for those working in the smaller offices behind – and like all games, this one only works if everyone follows the rules. Right now, the rules in America’s zero-sum income game are heavily stacked in favor of the excessively wealthy and against the excessively poor; and because they are, they are rules that we need to change.

No matter how often some conservative commentators deny it, there is still massive poverty in the contemporary United States, the bulk of which is involuntarily acquired. Of course, if we are crazy enough to only measure poverty against some absolute and timeless scale, then there is no real poverty now because everyone in the contemporary United States lives so much better than did people in the past, since technological progress here has been so great over the last century as a whole. But to measure poverty in that way is to trivialize the issue.  Better therefore to define poverty either against a basket of goods representing a minimum acceptable standard of life (as we do here in the United States when calculating the official poverty rate), or against a percentage of median income (say 60 percent, as do the Europeans); and if we do, we must see overwhelming evidence of the persistence of genuine poverty in the midst of all our contemporary affluence: evidence such as this.[10]

l. The official poverty level is currently 15.1 percent, and the twice poor (those living within one income tranche of the poverty level for their scale of family) currently make up nearly one American in three. New data from the Census Bureau actually points to an increase in the scale of U.S. poverty – poverty is currently on the rise in America, back in percentage terms in 2010 to the level last seen in 1998: and in absolute numbers – at 46.2 million people – greater than at any time since poverty figures were first calculated in the 1960s. We also have new data on the number of children in poverty – that number increased in 2010 for the fourth year in a row – to reach nearly one child in four (22%). The figure for child poverty has not been that high since 1993, and stands in stark contrast to the scale of child poverty elsewhere in the industrialized world: 3.7% in Denmark according to the OECD, 8.3% in Germany, and 9.3% in France.[11]

2. We also have data on the scale of hunger and food insecurity currently prevalent among the ranks of the American poor. In 2009 15.6 million children received food stamps each month, a 65% increase on the number a decade ago.[12] As the recent CAP report put it, the recession and tepid recovery together “swelled the ranks of American households confronting hunger and food insecurity by 30%. In 2010 48.8 million Americans lived in food insecure households….12 million more people than faced hunger in 2007.” That number – 48.8 million – represents 16.1% of the total US population: nearly one American in six currently facing tough choices on a daily basis about what they can and cannot afford to spend. “In 2010 nearly half of the households seeking emergency food assistance reported having to choose between paying for utilities or heating fuel and food. Nearly 40 percent said they had to choose between paying for rent or a mortgage and food. More than a third reported having to choose between their medical bills and food.”[13]

3. We also have solid data on the level of involuntary unemployment. Fourteen million Americans are currently without work in an economy that created only 103,000 jobs in September and actually lost 34,000 in the public sector. Local government payrolls are at their lowest since 2005, white collar unemployment has now run at twice its pre-recession level for 29 consecutive months, the number of long-term unemployed is now 6.2 million, and the under-employment rate is 16.5%: 25.8 million workers either unemployed or trapped in involuntary part-time employment. There are currently four unemployed workers for everyone one job opening. Unemployment among Hispanic workers is currently 11.3% and among African Americans 16.0%, among whites 8.0%, and overall 9.1% ‘The U.S. economy is currently generating 6.6 million fewer jobs than it did before the 2008-9 recession.”[14]Herman Cain may blame the unemployed for their condition, but it seems fairer to point the finger of responsibility at the recession itself.

4. The data also shows a persistent racial dimension to poverty (as well as to the distribution of income and wealth) in the contemporary United States. The poverty rate among Hispanic Americans is currently 26.6% and among African Americans 27.4%. The equivalent figure for Asian Americans is 12.1% and for white Americans just 9.9%. A third of Hispanic children in the U.S. live in poverty. More than a third of African-American children do. The wealth gap between Whites, Black and Hispanics is at a record high. The median net worth of white households in 2009 was $113,149; of Hispanic households $6,325; and of black households $5,677 – “lopsided wealth ratios [which] are the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter of a century ago and roughly twice the size of the ratios that had prevailed between these two groups for the two decades prior to the great recession that ended in 2009.”[15] The White-Black wealth ratio is currently close to 20:1.

5. We have solid evidence too of an increase in the number of Americans without health care coverage – 900,000 more in 2010 than in 2009, and nearly 50 million in total. As the Kaiser Foundation report, The Uninsured: a Primer recorded in December 2010, “the steady decline in employer-sponsored health coverage since 2000 and the current weak job market largely explain the growing numbers of uninsured.” Affecting Americans of “all ages, races and ethnicities and income levels,” and in spite of the link between work and benefits in our current welfare system, “more than three-quarters of the uninsured, “ the Primer said, “come from working families – four in ten of the uninsured are individuals and families who are poor.”[16]

6. Finally, we have data on the limits on social mobility in contemporary America. Even before the financial meltdown and resulting recession, the best evidence we have suggests “that children from low-income families have only a 1% chance of reaching the top 5% of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22% chance”; that African-American children born into the bottom quartile are twice as likely to stay there as white children born to parents with similar income; and – perhaps most shocking of all – that U.S. rates of intergenerational mobility are now lower than those in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark.[17]

All this adds up to one clear truth: most Americans are not poor because they made bad choices in relation to education, work and the timing of children. Most Americans are poor because they can’t find work in an economy now beset with both recession-created and structurally-induced unemployment. People are without work because the financial crisis of 2008 generated a recession that destroyed jobs. People are without work because whole industries have been outsourced to cheaper labor markets overseas. Textile and furniture employment in my state – North Carolina – has now largely relocated to South Asia and China. Under those conditions, people without work are victims, not architects, of their condition – and need to be honored as such. And if there is a cycle of deprivation – if the children of the poor have a greater propensity than others to stay poor – then those children are themselves innocent recipients of the consequences of the one involuntary decision we all make: namely our choice of parents. People may, by their own actions, move themselves around on the ladder of inequality: but for that movement to leave those at the bottom of the ladder mired in poverty, there have to be badly resourced lower rungs on that income ladder. If we want all Americans to escape poverty, we as a society have to stop creating poverty slots at the bottom of the ladder. We will get rid of poverty by shortening the ladder and by raising its base. We will not get rid of poverty by urging the poor to climb harder, leaving others behind to fill the poverty slots they have at least temporarily vacated.[18]

Given the severity of the deprivation at the bottom of the contemporary U.S. income ladder, it is hard to find much sympathy for the problems of the American super-rich, now (according to their defenders) suffering diminutions in their wealth because of poor returns on the stocks they hold. Maybe 2008 and 2009 were marginally difficult years for the top one percent of American income earners, but any sympathy for them would still be largely misplaced. For when all the data is in,  2010 and 2011 will no doubt have seen the re-establishment of the upward trajectory of their income and wealth;[19] and even if it has not, the super-rich will still hold 40 percent of our entire wealth and monopolize a quarter of the total American income bill.[20] The fact that the top one percent takes so much of our collective income and wealth means that there is less for the rest of us. So unless the rich can prove that their disproportionate claim on income and wealth stimulates investment and job creation from which the rest of us benefit – unless they can prove that trickle-down economics works – we will have to keep on saying, as the OWS protesters do, that income and wealth inequality on the scale we are experiencing now is best understood as theft.

Wealth creation is, after all, a collective endeavor. As Elizabeth Warren said, no one in America gets rich alone. The rules governing income and wealth distribution are socially determined, and for the last three decades in the United States, those rules have been stacked in the rich’s favor. With the scale of poverty and unemployment now around us, it is time for those rules to be reset. There are more than statistics at play here; and in truth the detail of the income and wealth statistics matters less than we might think. For no matter how the income numbers vary month by month or year by year, they consistently demonstrate that levels of inequality in contemporary America run remarkably deep. Because they do, they necessarily raise for all of us basic issues of morality. It is simply not right that children should be denied a level playing field on which to begin their pursuit of the American Dream; and it is indefensible that people of color should be denied the right to participate fully in the society than their forebears did so much to create. In the end, setting the detailed statistics aside, it is vital that we ask more fundamental questions. To what degree are we all fellow-citizens in this society, and to what degree are we not?  Are we one America or are we two? If we are one America – or at least if we want to be one America, united and at social peace – it is surely time to make the alleviation of poverty our number one priority. Inside the 99 percent, it is surely time to focus hard on the needs of the bottom fifth.

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[1] Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007,Washington DC: Congressional Budget Office, October 2011.

 [2] Robert Pear, “Top Earners Double Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds,” The Washington Post, October 25, 2011.

 [3] Lawrence Mishel, ‘Data on income gains supports 99ers gripes,” Economic Snapshot,Washington DC: Economic Policy Institute, October 19, 2011.

 [4] Eugene Robinson, ‘the study that shows why Occupy Wall Street struck a nerve,” The Washington Post, October 27, 2011: available athttp://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-study-that-shows-why-occupy-wall-street-struck-a-nerve/2011/10/27/gIQA3bsMNM_story.html

 [5] Michael Tanner, Equally Poorer, Washington DC: The Cato Institute,  October 26, 2011: available at http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13803

 [6] See for example, Alan Reynolds, Has U.S. Income Inequality Really Increased?Washington DC; Cato Institute Policy Analysis, No. 586, January 8, 2007: available athttp://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6880

 [7] But less now than in the past, according to the CBO report: “The equalizing effect of transfers and taxes on household income was smaller in 2007 than it had been in 1979…In 1979, households in the bottom quintile received more than 50 percent of transfer payments. In 2007, similar households received about 35 percent.” (Trends…., p. xii)

 [8] See Nicholas Eberstadt, The Poverty of “The Poverty Rate”, Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, October 16, 2008: available athttp://www.aei.org/issue/28926 and Robert Samuelson, “Why Obama’s poverty rate measure misleads,” The Washington Post, May 31 2010: available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/30/AR2010053003296.html

 [9] See Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson, Understanding Poverty in America, Washington DC: The Heritage Foundation, January 2004: available at http://heartland.org/policy-documents/understanding-poverty-america

 [10] For an earlier view, see David Coates, The Poverty That Blights us All, posted August 9, 2010 and available at: http://www.davidcoates.net/2010/08/09/the-poverty-that-blights-us-all

 [11] Data in Bernie Sanders, Is Poverty a Death Sentence? posted on The Huffington Post, September 13, 2011: available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/is-poverty-a-death-senten_b_960598.html

 [12] Charles M. Blow, ‘The Decade of Lost Children,” The New York Times, August 5, 2011: available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/opinion/the-decade-of-lost-children.html

 [13] Donald S. Shepard, Elizabeth Steren and Donna Cooper, Hunger in America, Washington DC: Center for American Progress, October 2011: available athttp://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/10/hunger.html

 [14] Heidi Shierholz, Miserable Low Job Growth, Economic Policy Institute, October 7, 2011: available at http://www.epi.org/blog/quick-take-miserable-job-growth/

 [15] Paul Taylor et al, Twenty-to-One: Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics, Washington DC: Pew Research Center, July 26, 2011: available at http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/

 [16] The Uninsured: A Primer – Key Facts About Americans Without Health Insurance,The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, December 2010, p. 1: available athttp://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/14109

 [17] Tom Hertz, Understanding  Mobility in America, Center for American Progress, April 26, 2006: available at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html  See also Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg and Stephen Machin, Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America, London, Center for Economic Performance & Sutton Trust, April 2005.

 [18] As was argued earlier in Answering Back, “Personal responsibility is the necessary last moment. We can all agree on that. But if the Republican audience genuinely wants the American social play to have the happy ending they desire, they will have to do something too about the inequalities and inadequacies that currently characterize the stage-set on which it is being performed. If they do not work on the positions that create poverty, and focus instead only on the individuals currently occupying them, all that can happen is that some of those individuals will escape to affluence, but the positions of the poor will still be there, to be filled by the next generation of the under-resourced. People will rotate in and out of poverty, but poverty itself will remain.” (David Coates, Answering Back, New York: Continuum Books, 2010, pp. 67-8)

[19] Josh Biven and Lawrence Mishel, Occupy Wall Streeters are right about the skewed economic rewards in the United States, Washington DC; Economic Policy Institute, October 26, 2011: available at http://www.epi.org/publication/bp331-occupy-wall-street/

 [20] Joseph Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair, May 2011: available athttp://www.americanpendulum.com/2011/04/joseph-stiglitz-of-the-1-by-the-1-for-the-1/

Tags: income inequality, morality, OWS, poverty, wealth distribution

David Coates holds the Worrell Chair in Anglo-American Studies at Wake Forest University. He is the author of Answering Back: Liberal Responses to Conservative Arguments, New York: Continuum Books, 2010. 

He writes here in a personal capacity.