In the house in which I grew up, we didn't have hors d'oeuvres with our dinner. But somewhere along the line I learned you're suppose to eat them before the main course. Obviously that's not a lesson the organizers of this conference learned since they scheduled me to speak after John Lapp (maybe I'll be like an after-dinner mint).
But eating out of order is okay today because we are obviously an impolite gathering. Impolite because we are discussing two things that polite company avoid: religion and politics. And when I speak of politics, I mean it in a broad sense: determining how we are to live together, how we as a community structure our public institutions, how we are to relate to our neighbor. That's what politics means to me.
The subject I was asked to speak on is superpower citizenry: i.e. how should people of faith living in the United States do politics (in this broad sense), or what does it mean for Christians to hold citizenship in the world's sole superpower?
First, I should mention that you cannot authentically talk about being a superpower citizen without raising some impolite or uncomfortable realities. To look at this issue means looking at the cost in terms of human misery and death that have been necessary to develop and sustain our superpower status. And it means looking at the ways the church -- including my beloved Mennonite Church -- has acculturated to a superpower way of life. So if you are largely comfortable and untroubled by your superpower citizenry, then what I have to say may sound impolite, ungrateful and at times unpatriotic. But I trust that a search for the truth is more important than maintaining some superficial level of comfort.
And my conflicted truth is that I believe that living in the "sole remaining superpower" is fraught with temptation for those seeking to follow Jesus, but I'm also quite glad to live here on Turtle Island, as the aboriginal people called this great land. For I would not want to live in a world without the Holy Cross mountain range in Colorado or Las Placitas restaurant in Washington DC, or Bruce Springsteen, or Wrigley field or Chicago deep dish pizza. This is my home and I long for its redemption.
My second prefatory comment is an observation about our choice of language. To think of ourselves as citizens is somewhat antiquated in most American circles. Citizenship suggests an inter-connectedness with other citizens, a common concern; it suggests certain rights as well as certain responsibilities; it suggests a community-mindedness.
But we don't think so much in those terms today. The dominant paradigm is not to think of ourselves as citizens, but as taxpayers. In the early eighties we became taxpayers instead of citizens. And taxpayer suggests something very different: a heightened concern about what's in it for me, what is it costing me, and what can I get out of this. It's the triumph of individualism over community.
So I am glad to reclaim the term citizen and all that it connotes for this discussion.
But simply claiming the need to be a good citizen or community-minded only begs the question of how we as followers of Jesus Christ are to behave, respond and react to the reality that our community writ large is known as the sole remaining superpower on earth. What, if anything, is our unique challenge?
Biblically, I would suggest that our challenge is much like the one placed before Moses. Moses, like us, was a citizen of the superpower of his day, and also like us, he was part of God's people. He was a Hebrew growing up in an Egyptian household. And in a moment of truth and recognition, Moses remembers who he is and whose he is. He feels the solidarity with God's people -- his kin -- who are suffering, and this begins his journey as God's servant.
In shedding his Egyptian identity and turning toward God's people, Moses encounters Yahweh. And through that encounter, Moses learns that Yahweh is a God who hears the cries of the oppressed, and that Yahweh has a plan for their liberation. This of course is counter to the kingdom aspirations of Egypt -- the great superpower of antiquity. And so the great tension, or temptation, or crossroad, is set before Moses, as it is set before us: are we to follow the ways of Egypt, or Babylon, or Rome or any of the great powers right up to the United State of America -- or do we follow this undescribable, unpredictable, uncontainable, unnameable God who says, "I have heard the cry of my people, and I send you to Pharaoh to bring my people out of Egypt."
If the latter, then our task is set. As Ched Myers says, we must learn how to be non-Egyptian. That is, how to be God's people rather than Pharaoh's or some other superpower's people. You can't have two masters, so the bible tells us.
If I'm right about that, then I want to suggest four guidelines for us as followers of Yahweh in a 21st century superpower. These are my suggestions on how we are to be non-Egyptian in our situation today.
I. First and foremost, we need to reclaim the radical message of Jesus and the entire Scriptures. For the most part, to be a Christian in the United States is to simply be a pietistic mirror of the rest of our community. It's as if the alternative we are offering to the world is of a slightly more polite, slightly less profane lifestyle; or of one who keeps a neat yard and petitions for divine guidance before investing in the market. I want to suggest that that is not the vision for which Jesus was hammered to a tree.
Yet, living inside a superpower country, we've come to accept a domesticated gospel, one which does not threaten the structures of power. We've spiritualized biblical stories about landless peasants and rich landowners, lords and slaves, and lepers and lawyers so that -- as William Herzog puts it -- they've become "earthly stories with heavenly meanings" when in fact they are "earthy stories with heavy meanings;" stories weighted down by descriptions of real life exploitation and oppression.
The May-June 1999 edition of The Other Side contains a powerful example of this. In it, the parable of the talents is re-analyzed (I want to share this both because it's a good example of my point and because I believe it is the lectionary reading for tomorrow -- so you may be hearing a sermon on it then). You may remember that this story is of the three slaves who are each given a different number of talents to take care of and invest. A talent, if you don't know, was a value of money that might be roughly translated today to about $2.5 million.
I asked my eight-year-old son what this story is about, and he quickly told me that the story is about our need to work hard and not waste what God has given us -- particularly, don't be like that bad slave who buries his talent and is banished when the master returns. That's the classic answer, and it's why we usually hear a sermon on this text during stewardship Sunday. But Herzog and others suggest that we've read the story exactly backwards, and in a way that purposely does not challenge our superpower ways.
To accept the traditional reading of this story, one has to overlook the fact that it presents the God-figure as an absentee lord who is hard-hearted, ruthless and cares only about profit maximization while the "good" slaves engage in intolerably high levels of wealth accumulation -- at least by biblical standards (we, on the other hand, have nearly lost sight of any sense that one can earn too much).
The non-Egyptian way of hearing this story -- and I would suggest, the intended way -- is to recognize that the true hero of the story is actually the third slave. He refuses to participate in this exploitive accumulation of wealth; he refuses to practice Egyptian economics and thus buries his talent in the ground. As a result the master castigates him as "'evil and lazy' (the favorite slur of the rich toward those who don't play the game)," and banishes him to utter darkness. This is the prophet's fate, but as the bible tells us in the very next story about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, it is in the margins of society (those unlit, unglamourous, unattractive edges of society) that Christ is known to dwell. To leave Egypt, or get kicked-out of Egypt is to come in closer contact to the true Lord, who dwells with the poor and oppressed.
That's just one example of rediscovering the radical biblical critique of superpower ways, but there are many more. They're there in the prophets' challenges to national injustice, they're in the bible's apocalyptic literature, they're in Jesus' teachings to love enemies and welcome the stranger, and they're especially in the biblical stories about idols. To be a Christian in this superpower means to discover and have ears to hear those challenges to the ways of superpowers which have been there in the bible all along.
II. Second, after reclaiming the radical message of the bible, Christians in a superpower are called to break their silence and tithe their influence. It's not enough to simply be a learned student of the scriptures. Like Moses, we must go and speak truth to Pharaoh.
The demon of unchecked power (a.k.a. super power) needs one thing to prosper: the silent consent of the people. And that is exactly what Pharaoh has been getting more and more of in the United States these days. There has been a steady erosion of the checks on power recently. For example:
So in the midst of this increasing power of the modern day Pharaohs, followers of Yahweh must speak out, act up or in some creative prayer-discerned way, object to the destructiveness which this brings. To not do so is to ignore the cries of the poor and the trampled upon -- those cries which Yahweh hears.
To be sure, there are both positive and negative, or destructive and redemptive, ways for Christians to advocate for political change (we could compare and contrast the Christian Coalition and the Civil Rights movement as one way to analyze this), but to simply walk away from political advocacy, either with cynicism that nothing I do matters or with a sense that engaging in politics will sully our hands and make us less pure, has the same effect on the destructive powers of Pharaoh -- it encourages them.
I sometimes think we ought to regard political power more like we do money. Now if I asked how many of you in this room are rich, few if any would admit to it even though when we make a global comparison we are forced to admit that nearly all of us are quite rich indeed. Just as we hesitate to acknowledge our wealth, we are also quite hesitant to acknowledge the amount of political influence we have. Perhaps denying these two things helps us sleep better at night.
But despite the denials, we have more than we recognize, and we need to think about giving back or tithing both for God's purposes. Working on Capital Hill for over five years, both for MCC and in a congressional office, leaves me with no doubt that the witness of individual citizens can make a significant difference.
That being said, you may recall that I also lamented the fact that the interests of wealth are accumulating a greater degree of political power. That is why I've come to believe that campaign finance reform is one of the most under-rated peace and justice issues. Without credible reform, we are going to lose more often that we should on issues like military spending, health care reform, economic justice and the hundreds of other justice issues we care about because the politics of money plays such a huge role in the lives of our elected officials. When weapon manufacturers, who benefit from increased military spending, lavish members of Congress with $8.3 million of campaign contributions the same year peace groups gave $370,000, you know the Pentagon's budget isn't going to be critically examined the way it should be. Senators believe they need to raise $15,000 in contributions each week, and they are going to listen to those who deliver the cash.
My second comment about which issues we choose to speak out on has to do with the geography of our issues. So as not to make anyone feel too defensive on this point, I'll use myself as an example of the problem here. In the 1980s, when our country was funding various wars in Central America, I became quite active on issues concerning this region. And for good reason -- there were terrible injustices being perpetrated by my government and people were dying as a result. So I started doing legal work for the Central American Refugee Project in Denver, helped my congregation there become a sanctuary church for illegal refugees, and became well-versed in the subtleties of Nicaraguan politics. I knew all about the major political parties there as well as a dozen minor parties. Yet at the same time, I did not know who my local state representative was.
The way of the super power is to see itself as the world's problem-solver but not to recognize the justice issues here in our midst. We need to be careful not to mimic that pattern. Often we peace & justice types find conflict in the Middle East, Latin America, Northern Ireland or anywhere far away to be so much more interesting than problems here; problems like racism, gun violence, unjust health care system, etc. We need to examine this and question the motives that lead us to want to champion distant troubles and ignore those in our county, state or country. This is not a call to disengage from global issues, but to seek a balance.
III. My third of four guidelines for superpower citizenry is that in addition to speaking out, or rather as a precursor to speaking out, Christians in a superpower need to be a city on the Hill; need to be modeling their vision; need to be living as if the kingdom of God really is at hand.
Our problem, as Christians and particularly as Mennonites, it that we've become acculturated. We've come out of the wilderness and just like the Israelites, we started behaving like Egyptians. We've accepted many of the norms of the prevailing culture and in many ways we've become indistinguishable from the world surrounding us. And that undermines anything we have to say to the powers in Washington, D.C. or elsewhere. For example, there are many reasons why Marian Franz and others have labored for decades for the Peace Tax Fund bill in Congress and have yet to realize their dream. But certainly one reason is that we Mennonites have developed a level of comfort with paying our taxes despite the fact that 43 percent of our tax money goes to build armaments and prepare for war. Therefore when I've accompanied Marian into congressional offices to share our conscientious objections to this, I'd often hear congressional aides ask whether this is truly a Mennonite concern since they hear so little of Mennonites who refuse to pay this. If we have a different vision to offer the world, we need to live it -- not just lobby for it.
Similarly, just like the Israelites forgot they were God's people and began to have rich and poor among them mirroring their surrounding culture, so have we Mennonites. This to me is most striking in the area of health insurance. In the early 1990s all the appropriate Mennonite institutions spoke of the urgent need for health care reform and the tragedy of those without access to basic health care. Yet when reform measures in Congress failed, it was back to business as usual for much of the church. Especially striking has been that our church institution which sells health insurance has grown incredibly wealthy in the last decade but still you have people -- such as those in my own congregation -- who are in desperate need for insurance but denied coverage from that same institution because of a pre-existing condition. I wonder whether if we first saw ourselves as God's people, rather than foremostly Americans within our superpower economic system, we would do better at finding ways to make membership in the Mennonite church coterminous with health insurance. Why is it, I wonder, do we tolerate this injustice among us?
IV. Fourth and finally, Christians living in a superpower need to address and respond to their superpower privilege.
Anti-racism training has emphasized the need for privileges to be identified, understood and challenged. In that context of race, Tobin Miller Shearer writes that, "I know of no better way for white people to continue the journey toward a multi-cultural community than to reflect on the privilege given them simply by having white skin." The privileges for white people include not having to think about race, believing that our assumptions and experience are the norm, and not having to deal with the oppression people of color must face. So, to be anti-racist is to discard these kind of privileges.
I suggest that many of these insights about white privilege apply to superpower privilege. First of all, we have the privilege of not having to think about it. I, for one, don't often think of myself as a citizen of a superpower, and how different that is from most of the world's inhabitants. Additionally, the sense I often get from the media is that events of consequence, or ideas and products of worth, originate here. And that's the message beamed around the world. Consequently, I've met people in Central American as well as in Europe who tell me that Americans are all rich and beautiful -- we and our lifestyle are the norm.
But of course, that's a lie. We are not living the norm. We are living a life full of incredible privilege; a fairy tale to many in the rest of the world. The norm is that 1.3 billion people -- one third of the population of the developing world -- live on less than a dollar a day. The norm is that in developing countries, one child in 10 dies before his fifth birthday. The norm is that more than 800 million people are malnourished and go to bed hungry.
But it's different for us. Although 1.3 billion of my global brothers and sisters don't have access to safe drinking water, I don't always remember to turn off the tap when I brush my teeth. That and a hundred other luxuries are part of the benefit of being born in this superpower. And the difficult, guilt-inducing, troublesome truth is that the superpower citizenry from which I benefit is a result of our country's domination of the world --a domination we are intent on maintaining. As Texas Sen. Phil Gramm (who apparently is a budding theologian) has said, "Even in a world where the lion and the lamb are about to lie down together, we ... are committed to the principle that the United States of America must always be the lion."
Well, I know of no other way to really see these privileges, these global injustices, than to stand in those places that we usually avoid. You don't usually see the reality of superpower privileges here at Goshen College, or at the seminary or living in the suburbs. No, you have to stand in the places where the poor and the marginalized stand.
I believe Jesus doesn't just ask us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked because of the tremendous amount of unmet human need, but also because of the conversion effect that doing so has on us. It is there we begin to see the extravagant ways of our lifestyle and to ask at what cost it is being maintained.
Wendell Berry writes that "the most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful." Friends, to be followers of Jesus in the midst of the richest and most powerful country in the world is to refuse to let economic injustice -- or superpower privilege -- rule our lives.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, there is an African American proverb which says, "It is easier to get the people out of Egypt than to get Egypt out of the people." And getting Egypt out of the people and out of ourselves, is our difficult task as citizens of the "sole remaining superpower." I've suggested that four key ingredients to achieving this are to reclaim the radical message of the gospel, to utilize our influence for change, to model our alternative vision in the church and to be proactive in addressing our superpower privileges. These, I believe, are not optional endeavors for followers of Yahweh. To the extent we are not consciously pursuing alternative disciplines we are being socially and spiritually formed by the dominant culture.
But as we go forth to share our vision and to struggle
for change, let us always do so with a spirit of compassion, not contempt.
In the tenth chapter of Mark's gospel it is noted that "Jesus looked
at the rich man and loved him" (Mark 10:21). It is out of love, that
the demand for change arises in the bible. May that be so for us as well.
AMEN.
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Comments about this article may be e-mailed to: John Fisher, johnjf@goshen.edu
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Published: 6/16/00