Weep and Howl!
Stephen Terry
Commentary for the December 6, 2014 Sabbath School Lesson
“Now listen, you rich people, weep
and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted,
and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion
will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth
in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your
fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the
ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and
self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have
condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.” James
5:1-6, NIV
Many years
ago, I read a book about the experience of a Peace Corps worker in Latin
America. When she arrived in the village where she was to perform her year of
service, she asked who the head man of the village was. The man that was
pointed out to her was said to be the richest man in the village. How did they
measure wealth in that jungle village? He was the only man who possessed a box
spring for his bed. Mind you, he had no mattress to place upon it. He had only
the metal box spring with no covering, but that was enough that everyone in the
village envied his wealth.
To those of
us living in much more affluent countries, this may seem laughable, but it is a
stark reminder that much of the world does not enjoy the luxuries we take for
granted. Many families live in huts that do not even have the square footage of
our master bedroom suites, let alone the Queen or King beds with their
accompanying furnishings that adorn them. Too many have no running water in
their homes and perhaps no reliable source of water at all. In contrast we fuss
when we do not have a double vanity in the Master Bath. Where 50 years ago,
many families in the United States queued up outside their home’s only bathroom
door, homes are now often built with 3 or more bathrooms to eliminate waiting.
Recently
protest movements proclaimed that 1% of the population in America had almost
all the wealth with the other 99% relegated to poverty, oppression and
ultimately starvation. While this is an overly dramatic presentation of
conditions in this country, that is perhaps not its biggest distortion. Its
biggest error is that it overlooks the perspective of all those around the
world who look at the financially oppressed in that 99% and would gladly trade
places with them. From their global perspective, the wealth of those who claim
to be impoverished in the United States still makes them “the richest man in
the village.”
We grumble
over our treatment at the hands of the one percent, yet have we not done the
same to the rest of the world? We jealously guard our borders in an attempt to
make sure that those who would seek to share in our good fortune not be allowed
to do so as sharing would diminish what we already possess. While we always
want more, we seem never to be happy with less. We are reminded of that every
day with the litany of advertisements telling us what new thing we can have and
how easy it is to obtain the credit to make it possible. This reveals the
self-delusion of our treasure that we would protect from those immigrant
hordes. That treasure is not really ours anyway. It belongs to our creditors.
True, we tell ourselves it will one day be paid off and then it will be ours.
But how is that working out for you? Many are finding that the debts only
increase over time as more and more “necessities” must be paid for with credit
because our payments to service that credit prevent us from saving anything. Earlier generations paid cash far more often
instead of borrowing themselves deeper and deeper into debt.
Some are
looking for that one lucky break that will deliver them from this cycle.
Billions of dollars are spent for lottery tickets by people chasing that dream.
When I was a child, credit was not so common. A family might have a “tab” at
the grocery store, but that was about it. Most did not, but paid with cash each
payday for the groceries to last them until next paycheck. Now it is very
common to pay for perishables with a credit card. Woe then to the person who
loses their job and cannot afford to make the payments for that credit card.
I grew up in
a home of a little over 900 square feet with three bedrooms and one bathroom.
Six of us lived in that home: Mother, Father, two boys and two girls. We slept
two to a bedroom. This was common in our small town. A home of 1100-1200 square
feet seemed almost like a mansion to us because of all the extra room. Today, the
average home size is 2600 square feet[i]
and with smaller families, the children often all have their own rooms. Is all
of this wrong? Perhaps not from the perspective of those who enjoy such things,
but is there no significance to the perspective of those who do not? Do their
needs and desires have no value in the modern financial world view?
When each
person stands as an equal with all other persons before God, there is little
justification for hording wealth or envying those who do so. If all needs are
met, the accumulation of wealth serves only an esoteric purpose and may even be
an aberration. That aberration feeds our selfishness and makes the world less
enjoyable for everyone. For example, I know of those who are guitar players
like me, but who may own dozens of guitars. The money invested in these
instruments runs to the many thousands of dollars. Yet, in the same city in
which they live, there are those who would love to learn to play a musical
instrument but cannot afford to purchase one. Those who are thus deprived are
deprived because others choose to hoard rather than share, and they are also
deprived because the artificial demand for those instruments created by the
hoarders drives the prices higher than necessary. This is because price in a
capitalist economy tends to be a function of demand. But I am not advocating
for a guitar revolution. This is only an example to illustrate the point. Some
feel they can never have enough of a resource, while others suffer acutely from
a lack of those same resources.
Somehow, the
early Christian church understood how detrimental this could be to their faith.
They pooled their resources and distributed them according to need.[ii]
This does not mean that everyone sat around doing nothing, feeding off of the
resources of others.[iii]
However, it does mean that no one who is working should be deprived of what is
necessary if others have the means to make sure those needs are met while still
meeting their own needs. (N.B. the word is “needs” not “wants”) If the early
Christians understood this, maybe it is appropriate to ask how we have wandered
off that path. Why has it become acceptable to own more and fancier vehicles at
greater expense while others cannot afford even one old jalopy? Is it simply to
possess them? Why must our houses grow larger and larger while many are
homeless? Is it because of a need to horde more and more things in them? How
many streets in our cities have expensive cars parked out in the elements because
the garages are so full of possessions that there is no room for the vehicles? Has
all of this made us any more moral?
The United
States has an epidemic of substance abuse, perhaps made possible by an
affluence that allows us to far too easily purchase such things. We vilify the
poor as undeserving, accusing them of criminality and drug addiction. Yet with
Florida’s recent experiment with mandatory drug testing for welfare applicants,
it was found that the poor are far less likely to be abusing drugs than the
population at large.[iv]
In spite of the stereotypical junkie passed out in an alley we see in television
dramas, a drug habit usually requires far more money than one can receive on
welfare. One of the less expensive drugs, heroin, can easily cost $150 - $200
per day.[v]
I know of no welfare system that pays that kind of money to a recipient. Why do
we then stigmatize the poor with such stereotypes?
Perhaps we
do so to justify our own selfish greed. After all if we consider the poor as
undeserving of any largesse, then by implication those of us who are not poor
must be deserving of what we have. Maybe this is where we have gone wrong in
our thinking. Have we forgotten that because of our unrighteousness,[vi]
we are deserving only of death?[vii]
There are those who feel that we deserve such things because we are Christians,
but there are plenty of poor people who are Christians as well. Why should we
be more deserving than them? Or are we advocating some sort of salvation by accumulation
of possessions? At what point does our luxury and self-indulgence rise to the
level condemned by James in the passage at the top of this commentary? At what
point does our selfish hoarding contribute to the death of those who are
deprived of what they need so we can have what we merely desire? For many of
us, these are uncomfortable issues James raises.
