Sermon – September 6, 2009: Rich and Poor
Sermon for Sunday, September 6, 2009 First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Rich and Poor
Proverbs 22: 1-2, 8-9, 22-23; James 2: 1-10, 14-17; Mark 7: 24-37
The organization of laborers to bargain collectively with employers has been a
strategy in negotiating the relationship of the poor and the rich. Today’s scriptures remind us
that finding the right approach to unequal wealth among members of a society is an age-old
matter, and I want to preach today about a double-mindedness which we, as Americans,
have about haves and have-nots
First, though, I want to remind everyone that this holiday weekend was sanctioned
by the national government as a tribute not to work as such, but to Labor with a big “L,”
organized labor, or the union movement. In order to understand how that happened, we
have to recognize the political calculation in it. To do that I’ll begin by discussing the creation
of a national holiday honoring The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The country has a national holiday honoring Dr. King not only because he gave his
life to a great cause at an important period of our history, but because he was an
integrationist–he had a vision that would keep people together; and he was a pacifist–he
believed in and preached and practiced nonviolence as a way to make progress. The
problems his life was spent addressing never vanished, and the fears and resentments
attendant upon racial mistrust and mistreatment never vanished, and the creation of a holiday
was a way to send a message to everyone that the country supported King’s goal. By
establishing the holiday, the country took a stance that it wanted everyone to work together
peaceably for peace and justice. The holiday owes its existence not only to positive
sentiment about the significance of King’s life and work, but to the negative fact that there
was a real chance that without a signal from Washington that the country wanted integration
pursued peaceably, people who were frustrated with nonviolence as an approach and with
integration as a goal might gain influence following King’s assassination.
There’s a similar story behind Labor Day. Declaring a national holiday honoring the
organized workers of the nation, acknowledging their contribution to the public good and
their American citizens’ right to organize themselves as a way of leveling the economic
playing field, wasn’t done in a vacuum. For all the disruption that organized labor
represented, and for what it cost the capital-possessing classes, it remained a more
desirable approach for aggrieved workers to take than some of the alternatives gaining
influence at the time. Unionization still played by familiar rules once contracts got negotiated.
There was still private ownership and capitalism and pay in exchange for production. Other
movements aroused by the relative poverty of the laboring classes didn’t endorse those
things. There were communists and anarchists and advocates of armed struggle, and once
labor unions seemed to have become the ascendant means of the humble to improve
themselves, the country was only too happy to legitimize that as the American way. Later,
when people’s lives improved enough that anarchy and communism had less appeal,
government policy favored organized labor less; but the reason we have the holiday of
Labor Day was that at one time collective bargaining was the least of the evils faced by
America in its business.
I said earlier that Americans have mixed feelings about relations between social
classes. I will use a man I once knew as an example. Usually I’d change a name in a case
like this, but I can’t resist telling you who this man really was, both because it’s no discredit to
him, what I’m going to say, and because his name is perfect for our purposes.
He was named Joe Santerre–the name from “sans terre,” or “without land,” in
French, born identified as descended from the class without property. Joe grew up on the
Cape, in the orbit of Hyannis and the Kennedy compound, part of a local populace proud
of their proximity to the wealthy and notable. He was happy to relate that relatives had
worked for the Old Man, that their community had been the village attached, as it were, to
the great house.
When you begin there, how do you get along? What but work?- work with one’s
hands, apprenticing oneself to skilled labor, so Joe became a carpenter. Not a big guy; he
wasn’t a big guy, and compensated by being aggressive. He related with pride how he’d
grabbed a section of two-by-four and declared his willingness to beat the men on the job
site who weren’t giving him enough respect. That’s the kind of clout he had, way back in the
twentieth century, when most American men worked with their backs, one way or another.
Joe found his way to Groton, Connecticut, where the Navy was building
submarines, and though the boats didn’t have much wood in them, the plant itself needed
carpenters, so there was work there. And in that big industrialized place, with its noon
whistle and time clocks and various trades jostling with each other under the guidance of
bosses, there came the effort to unionize.
That divided people in the plant. Every solution creates problems, and there were
people who didn’t like what the unions would do, what workers would have to give up to
get the clout a union would have, how their work life would change under a new system.
But Joe knew which side he was on. He was a union man, and being a feisty guy, a man
who showed people that he wasn’t afraid, he got in the thick of it, and took some lumps.
But he was proud. The carpenters got unionized, and they bought homes, and cars, and
the kids went to college. Millions of dollars a year were pouring into Groton, in the Cold
War submarine race, and Joe felt that unions meant that little people were getting some of
it, too.
I think of Joe, not just because the Kennedys have been in the news, but because
he had what seemed like a split personality about privilege and paychecks. He had the
Medieval peasant’s loyalty to the local aristocracy– and the Kennedys, for their part, always
had some loyalty to the little people, too–but Joe also refused to take the terms that early
twentieth-century capitalism was offering him without expanding his say in the matter
through collective bargaining. It was as if he admired the very wealthy and knew his place,
as the old saying goes, in the scheme of things, but also, closer to his own everyday life, he
thought it was fair that guys like him, who actually built things, got a bigger share of the
benefits of production.
We recognize the glamor of the prosperous, and we know, on some level, that lots
of things which somehow benefit everyone–like private universities and endowed
hospitals–result from resources spent by those with great wealth. At the same time we
regret the existence of poverty, and see that at least some of it results neither from
irresponsibility or indolence, but from forces beyond individual control. Doing something
constructive about material misery has practical, as well as altruistic motives, but finding a
way to relieve want without rewarding the wanton is an inevitable challenge.
Why do we worry about it? That gets to the scriptures for today, and the Bible’s
interest in relative wealth within a society. I say “relative wealth” because the Bible accepts
the existence of rich and poor, and recognizes that the status of having a good deal and the
status of having very little each pose spiritual problems for individuals, and by extension,
society. It is easy for the poor to resent the rich, and for the rich to despise the poor. Those
feelings undermine the sense of common purpose and common identity proper to
Judaism, which is not primarily a group of individuals but a People Chosen by God. As a
people it needs to keep a social equilibrium, in which everyone collectively feels
responsible to God and to each other, to maintain the well-being of the whole.
The reading from Proverbs today is a series of warnings about exploiting the
weakness of persons living in poverty, and failing to be charitable toward them. It
anticipates the possibility that economic competition and the allure of wealth may encourage
an “every man for himself” attitude. It insists that God cares for people with few resources,
and that God relies on the relatively prosperous to safeguard the interests of the poor. This
is almost the most basic of Biblical expectations, not just because it counts on what we
might regard as ordinary human sympathy, but also because failing to achieve interested
and constructive connections across social classes threatens the whole vision of society as a
people, as an extended family.
The Book of James worries that the church might lapse into the same trap of dividing
people by their material worth. Its vision is of a society with a goal of shared benefits and
common regard. Finally, the gospel exhibits two instances of Jesus taking the riches he
possesses beyond the boundaries of the extended family of Judaism, and using God’s
power to bless outsiders. It’s an acknowledgment that generosity across human barriers is
a stretch, and a demonstration that God’s love is something that we shouldn’t worry about
confining to the right people, but something we should fear failing to give away, outside the
circle of persons we naturally regard as having a claim upon it.