Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Thriving in Hard Times

For many decades now, American society has emphasized individual striving and achievement as the path the self-betterment and abundant life. Thanks be to God, we seem, at last, to be waking up. We have discovered that such a philosophy lifts only a few boats, leaving the rest to flounder. The economic crisis has finally brought it home. With the middle-class shrinking, pensions disappearing, 50 million uninsured, and a record number of foreclosures and evictions, we can no longer bury our heads in the sand. Mutual responsibility for our social well-being became a recurrent theme in both presidential campaigns (even though Barack Obama proved far more effective in articulating it than John McCain). We are at last coming to grips with the truth that we truly are our brother’s keeper. His welfare is our concern because our welfare depends on his. As Martin Luther King observed, “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
Yet as the realization dawns, the specter of economic hardship frightens us into a defensive posture, clasping what we have to our chest, unwilling to let go. Even as we insist that government and other institutions show greater compassion and generosity of spirit, we as private individuals can turn parsimonious, contradicting with our actions the best hopes of our hearts. Succumbing to such fears only compounds the problem, forcing us to lean on our own devices for support.
Scripture provides ample guidance to direct us away from our fears, giving us a vision of abundance which, had it been heeded on a societal as well as an individual level, could well have spared us the mess we are now slogging through. Here are the biblical principles that should direct us in hard times:

2 Corinthians 8:13b-14: "…but it is a question of a fair balance between your abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance." The primary principle: share what you have. Redistribution of wealth is a basic Christian economic goal. Paul exhorts the rich congregation in Corinth to aid the suffering churches of Macedonia in the name of a fundamental fairness. He reminds them that there may well come a time when the shoe will be on the other foot and they will require the generosity of the churches in Macedonia for their own needs. Citing Exodus, he argues that it is appropriate that the rich not have too much, nor the poor too little.


Matthew 14:20: "And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full." Second principle: you have more to share than you think. At the feeding of the 5000, there were a lot of hungry people, but the disciples had only two fish and five loaves. They were convinced this was far too little, but Jesus told them they had enough. When they listened to Jesus and distributed the food, they discovered he was right. Amazing things happen when we give what little we have. No better illustration of this principle exists than the story of the El Paso church group that decided to take the injunction to feed the hungry to heart and brought a picnic across the border to the ragpickers of Juarez, Mexico. The gesture elicited outpourings of generosity from others and ended up transforming the desperately poor community into one of hope and dignity, as people were moved to address the deeper needs of the ragpickers, building schools, job-training and community centers, and cooperative businesses around the dump where they had once picked rags. There is an abundance hidden in the midst of what we perceive as scarcity, but it cannot be unleashed without action driven by a giving heart.


Matthew 25:25-26a: “'…so I was afraid and went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.' But his master answered him, 'You wicked and slothful servant!…'” Third principle: hoarding out of fear is squandering and leads to diminishment. In the parable of the talents, the steward who simply stashes away what his master gives him for safekeeping, because he is afraid of what might happen if he invested it, is the one the master condemns. We often see this as grossly unfair, since the steward’s intent was simply to preserve what he had been given, not to keep it for himself. Similarly, we tend to grow fearfully cautious with the resources God has given us, all in the name of prudence, when God is in fact calling us to use those resources for the betterment of his kingdom. It is the steward who makes use of those resources who is rewarded. An all-too-common illustration of this principle is the budget-slashing church that strips its ministries of their resources in difficult times, all in the name of fiscal responsibility, only to discover that the demise of the youth group or music program or young adult ministry has caused the church to shrink further. It is the church that places ministry over maintenance that grows.


Acts 2:44: "All who believed were together and had all things in common." Fourth principle: sharing builds community. The earliest Christians were communitarians. They used what wealth they possessed to make sure the basic needs of their poorest members were met. The church created a very different vision of human community that was radical and transformative. The governing metaphor was that of a family or a household. It transcended all barriers, including tribe, ethnicity, and language. No one prior to the disciples had ever conceived of family as based on anything but blood and marriage or a society as based on anything other than ethnicity or imperial power. Even one hundred years after the Church was born, Justin Martyr could assert that “we, who once coveted greedily the wealth and fortune of others, now place in common the goods we possess, dividing them with all the needy.” The communitarian spirit of giving would lead Origen to claim at an even later date that “the communities of God, to which Christ has become teacher and guide, are in comparison with communities of the pagan people, among whom they live as strangers, like heavenly lights in the world.”

How do we thrive in hard times? The biblical witness is as counter-intuitive as it is clear: share what little you have. Perhaps our churches are as anemic as they are because, in times of plenty, we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by the greed and acquisitiveness of the world simply because there was always enough for the individual to thrive on his or her own, and so we have become less connected, less willing to obey the law of Christ by bearing one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2). To those who would question how a church can survive by sharing when it struggles to make budget or pay its staff, I offer the words of one the Episcopal Church’s most noted preachers, Barbara Brown Taylor: “How can the church survive that keeps pouring itself into the world? I cannot possibly say. All I know is the gospel truth: those willing to give everything away are the ones with anything worth keeping; those willing to look death full in the face are the ones with the most abundant lives. Go figure.”