The Gospel and Global Slavery

Last night as a group we went down to the historic Circle Cinema on Admiral and Lewis to view a British documentary on the issue of global slavery.  Amnesty International hosted the event, and props to Katarina Haukaas and the Tulsa chapter of Amnesty for putting on a great night.

The film focused specifically on three instances of modern day slavery: cocoa plantations on the Ivory Coast, rug-making looms in northern India, and (to my great surprise) there are even instances of slavery in the U. S.  The Department of State estimates that between 15 and 20 thousand individuals are trafficked into the U. S. each year to become slaves.  

A "slave" was defined as one who is "Forced to work--through mental or physical threat, owned or controlled by an 'employer', usually through mental or physical abuse or threatened abuse; dehumanized, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as 'property'; physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement."

In other words, slavery today is what it always has been--and perhaps worse.  Increased population and the pressure of the global market mean that slaves now are easier to come by and simultaneously less valuable.  The days of eeking out a marginally decent existence on the plantation of a southern diplomat in the 18th and 19th century are decisively over.

Of particular interest was the role the global economy plays in the issue of slavery. Competition fuels injustice, especially (for instance) in the cocoa industry.  With the price of cocoa falling steadily over the past twenty years, plantation owners on the Ivory Coast work strenuously to stay competitive on the market by keeping the total cost of each bag of cocoa produced extremely low.  What better way to get an edge than by restraining dozens of unpaid laborers under the threat of violence?  Productivity goes up; total costs go down; and farmers stay competitive.

What is most problematic is the prevailing assumption that the market will self-regulate so as to mitigate potential oppression and injustice: Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand."  Where that principle may have been true for local economies, it fails to hold for the modern global economy.  The baby tiger has grown up, and it's starting to knock stuff over in the living room. Passivity will not do any longer.  A self-regulating global economy is a contradiction in terms.

Which means then that the onus clearly is on the consumer to a) support organizations and initiatives that advocate for and implement structures that generate economic justice and b) demand accountability in the marketplace.  

So that got me thinking: What does it mean to be a consumer in the way of Jesus?  Clearly we cannot avoid being consumers.  But is there a way to be a consumer in a way that promotes shalom rather than mitigating it?

And to that end, is it under-defining "simplicity" when we think of it solely in terms of frugality?

Do I (can I) accurately and faithfully embody the message of Jesus with my spending habits? And how?

What do you think?

Go here for more information on the issue. 

Jesus Loves the Poor 2: Discipleship

So last week we began our subseries in Luke called "Jesus Loves the Poor" by looking at the Exodus and discussing how that is decisive for how we understand who God is and who he calls his people to be.

Last night we brought things back to Luke and began to take this whole matter of caring for those who are on the underside of power and relate it to the question of discipleship. What we found was that Luke's vision of discipleship to Jesus has as a crucial and indispensible component sustained generosity towards the poor.

Some examples from Luke might include:

1 - Luke 10:25ff - The Good Samaritan: we come to find that "your neighbor" is anyone who has fallen into trouble that you have the capacity to help. And apparently loving the Lord your God and loving your neighbor in the sense just described are the ways in which Luke's Jesus thinks people orient themselves towards and in fact receive "eternal life" or "the life of the age [to come]" (10:25).

2 - Luke 11:37-41 - "When Jesus had finished speaking, a Pharisee invited him to eat with him; so he went in and reclined at the table. 38But the Pharisee, noticing that Jesus did not first wash before the meal, was surprised.39Then the Lord said to him, "Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. 40You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? 41But give what is inside the dish to the poor, and everything will be clean for you." Whoa. Apparently only one thing will break the back of greed and wickedness, cleansing the soul of the Pharisee: almsgiving.

3 - Luke 14 - Participating in the great eschatological feast of God depends on our making space in our lives for the "poor, the blind, the lame, and the crippled."

We could go on and on. The point is that in the Lukan vision of discipleship to Jesus, there are some things that do not and cannot happen in the human person except by virtue of concrete acts of kindness and generosity done to the poor. And even more than that, there are some things that the human person cannot receive (i.e., "eternal life", ouch!) apart from such magnanimity. Jesus' disciples can't receive the kingdom from him when their hands are clutching worldly possessions.

It's not that he's being unfair or unkind to them. It's that it's an impossibility. He cannot force the kingdom upon those who have no space in their lives for it. And apparently, when it comes to money, possessions ("stuff"), the only way to create space for it is by building consistent, sustained generosity towards the poor (not building programs: though there is a place for that elsewhere in the Scriptures) into the fabric of our lives.

So it would appear that Jesus' disciples need the poor as much as (and I might argue more than) the poor need them. They help us see and experience the reign of God in Christ.

Perhaps this was put best by Mother Theresa when she said, "Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them."

Well said, Theresa.

Clothes and Food for the Poor

Last night at our college and career meeting we continued our "Jesus Loves the Poor" teaching series by examining how giving to the poor figures into Luke's vision of discipleship to Jesus (more on that later). After the teaching, we participated in the Lord's Supper and laid our gifts for the poor at the foot of his Table.

I'm honored to announce that folks donated what appears to be several hundred dollars worth of clothing. In addition (and this blows my mind), we raised $174 to give to John 3:16 Mission to help them purchase turkeys for their yearly Thanksgiving outreach.

Thanks be to God!

John 3:16 Thanksgiving Outreach

All right, everyone, don't forget that as an expression of what we're learning about God’s concern for the poor, we've decided to team up with John 3:16 Mission’s Thanksgiving outreach to help supply needed families with food and clothing

There are three ways you can help:

1 – Donate Time

On Monday, November 19th, from 12:30-4:30 p.m., a group of us will be going down to John 3:16’s Family and Youth Center to help distribute groceries to needy families. If you want to join, just let us know by emailing me at andrew@peopleschurchtulsa.com.


2 – Donate Clothing

This time of year, John 3:16 is always on the lookout for good, warm fall and winter clothing. So next Tuesday night, November 13th, at our regular College and Career gathering, we’ll be collecting the following used (or new!) clothing items: coats, sweatshirts, long sleeved shirts, pants, winter hats, gloves, and scarves. Make sure they’re in good condition, and let's try to build a huge freaking pile of clothes to put in the center of our worship circle as an expression of our desire to put God's heart for the poor on display!


3 – Donate Money

To help John 3:16 pay for turkeys to distribute, we’ll have a special collection box available next Tuesday night (the 13th) for you to drop your cash donations off in.

Jesus Loves The Poor 1

So tonight we began a subseries of our Luke series (which may last until 2009; hard to be sure) entitled "Jesus Loves the Poor." We're trying to understand the role that the poor and oppressed play in the ministry and message of Jesus and what that might mean for how we conceive of discipleship to Jesus. We kicked things off with a survey of Exodus, and noted several things:

1 - Exodus marks a new and decisive moment in the history of God. I know that's difficult language for our minds to handle, but the narrative of Exodus outlines it sharply in chapter 6: "1Then the LORD said to Moses, 'Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh: Because of my mighty hand he will let them go; because of my mighty hand he will drive them out of his country.' 2 God also said to Moses, 'I am the LORD. 3 I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name the LORD I did not make myself known to them. 4 I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, where they lived as aliens. 5 Moreover, I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered my covenant."

Clearly, this marks the inauguration of a completely new history of God. It is a watershed moment of epic proportions. Yahweh rolls out his name at precisely the moment when he defines himself by his pathic concern for the poor and oppressed, and his unrelenting determination to do something about it. This leads to the second point.

2 - The newly inaugurated history of Yahweh is defined by a radical concern for those who suffer under the weight of oppression. Over against the classic Christian teaching on God's impassibility, we have here something altogether different. This is not the God of classic theism. It is Yahweh. And Yahweh resists our categories. Where we once thought the deity was too detached, too remote, too prestigious, too sovereign to be affected by what happens here on planet earth (a stoic god is a safe god, isn't he?), instead we have the passionate, irascible Yahweh who is capable of getting "all worked up" about stuff.

In particular, this god Yahweh gets testy when people get bullied, taken advantage of, and forgotten. We noted several passages in Proverbs that speak to this, and what we found interesting was that: (a) The poor and oppressed belong to Yahweh in a unique sense, and (b) He will take up their side even against his own people. It is not too much to say that Yahweh's people are the poor and oppressed. And if we find this a problematic statement, we ought to give the Sage of Proverbs the third degree and no one else. Those subversive intelligentsia!

What must not be missed, though, is the danger this god Yahweh poses to empires and oppressors. Brueggemann I think was right in "The Prophetic Imagination" when he suggested that compassion is the ultimate social critique. Yahweh's compassion is amounts to "fightin' words" with Pharoah and the self-serving anti-Eden that he has created.

3 - God's choosing of a people is directly connected with his desire to enact his concern for the poor and oppressed in the world. Again, the narrative of chapter 3 is decisive in its description of Moses' calling: "And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. 10 So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt."

It would be difficult to be clearer than that. Yahweh chooses Moses in response to his deep concern for the plight of the oppressed. That is to say, Moses is irrelevant as a character in this theo-drama apart from the plight of the poor. If he fails in this, there is nothing left for him. To enact Yahweh's grand criticism of Pharoah's empire and bring about a new world of liberated possibility for Israel is the sum total of his calling. It's a pass-fail deal. Fail in this; fail in being you.

And lest we think this calling was exclusive to Moses, the compilers of Torah insist that we understand Israel's vocation as a whole as one that is connected to the revelation of the Exodus god, Yahweh. Deuteronomy 10:17-19: "For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. 18 He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. 19 And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt." Israel is an Exodus people living an Exodus ethic because of the Exodus god Yahweh who has called her into being to enact his purposes for the world.

What does this all mean for us? If Exodus is definitional for how we understand Yahweh, then several things flow. We noted two:

(1) We need to see the poor as occupying a very special place in the heart of God. He hears them, he sees them, he responds to their cry. Proverbs characterizes Yahweh as "their Defender" and "their Maker." That is, they belong to him. And he will "contend their contention" against those who oppress them. It was of interest to us that Yahweh as a character in the Exodus drama does not make an entrance onto the stage of that history until someone got bullied. That brought him out of hiding, and nothing else. This says something for how we understand God.

(2) We need understand that our “being chosen” by the Exodus God is defined by our “being sent” by Exodus God to put the Exodus God on display. Which means that caring for the poor is not a side-issue of discipleship: If we’re following the God of Exodus, and the Jesus of Jubilee (cf. Luke 4), then we have to see this as central and pivotal. We exist to make this peculiar God known: the God who is peculiarly interested in the underdog, in those who are on the underside of power.