A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — October 4, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts: Isaiah 58:1-10;  Selections from Mark 6, 8, 9 & 12
Worldwide Communion, Peacemaking, and Hunger Emphasis Sunday

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds

the oppressed go free…?  — Isaiah 58:6

[Jesus said,] “Whoever wants to be first must
be last of all and servant of all.” — Mark 9:35

One of the premier theologians of the 20th-Century, Karl Barth, liked to say that theologians, preachers, indeed all Christians, “should read with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”  That’s a big order, not least because keeping up with the daily news can be a full-time job… and the Bible can be hard to understand and apply.  Still, I intend to do just that this morning as we observe Worldwide Communion, Peacemaking, and Hunger Emphasis Sunday.  I’ll be looking at items from the newspaper on one hand and then reflecting on some of what we’ve heard as we’ve been reading our way through Mark this past year.

From the Columbus Dispatch, Wed., Sept. 30, the front page headline reads “Poverty in Ohio: Spreading and Getting Worse.” The article begins: “Crushing job losses and rising unemployment pushed nearly one in five Marion County residents into poverty last year, the highest rate among the state’s larger counties.”  Read really close and you’ll learn that virtually all of Ohio’s Appalachian counties were left out because the survey looked at only those counties with more than 65,000 people.  Going on:  “Of America’s top ten poorest cities, three are in Ohio—Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Toledo.  No other state had more than one.”

 

Read deeper, and you learn that this is for 2008 and things have only gotten worse this year.  What does this mean?  The director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks reports, “Ohioans are getting poorer every day.  We know from our food pantries, it has gotten worse day after day, week after week… Ohio is in a race to the bottom.”  This past August the Salvation Army food pantry in Marion struggled to keep up with demand, serving 1,020 individuals, “double the number the same month a year ago” as they are “seeing more and more people who’ve never sought help before.”  Food pantries all over Ohio report similar increases.  Hunger is a growing problem, even here in the richest nation on earth.

Mark 6:34-37a — As [Jesus] went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.  When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.’ But he answered them, ‘You give them something to eat.’

The disciples wanted the crowd of hungry people to fend for themselves, but Jesus said, “You give them something to eat.”  That’s what food pantries are all about.  We give food and money to Neighborhood Services.  Many here will walk next Sunday in CROP Walk.  Donations to food pantries are up, but so is demand.  Something much deeper is wrong with the system that leaves so many people falling further behind, struggling to put food on the table and a roof overhead. 

Over the past four months, Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, has written a series of four op-ed pieces in the New York Times.  The first (6/14/09), titled “Too Poor to Make the News,” is about how the media has focused so much on those Ehrenreich calls the Nouveau Poor—how “the super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilate’s classes; [and] the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee’s.”  Meanwhile, “the already poor, the 20%-30% of the population who struggle to get by in the best of times…who have all but ‘disappeared’ from both the news media and the public policy discussions.”  A quote from Candy Hill, V.P of Catholic Charities USA: “All the focus is on the middle class—on Wall Street and Main Street—but it’s the people on the back streets who are really suffering.”  If the already poor have “all but disappeared” from the media, that “newspaper in the other hand” Barth talked about is less likely to reveal what is wrong with the system—like the fact that disparities in wealth and income keep increasing, even though in America 2% of the people already own 50% of all the assets and 10% already make 45% of the income.

Ehrenreich notes: “Like the Nouveau Poor, the already poor descend through a series of deprivations, although these are less likely to involve forgone vacations than missed meals and medications.  The Times reported (in early June) “that one-third of Americans can no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions.”  Ehrenreich gives examples of how the poor try to make ends meet, from “food auctions, which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates” to two stories of “urban hunting.”  A 51-year-old laid-off mechanic in Racine, WI, supplements his diet “by shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled.”  In Detroit, a retired truck driver “is doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommended marinating with vinegar and spices.”

Mark 6:37b-44 — They said to him, ‘Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?’ And he said to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and see.’ When they had found out, they said, ‘Five, and two fish.’ Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And all ate and were filled; and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men.

According to some interpreters, Jesus and his followers inspired people in the crowd to share food they’d brought with them.  Maybe so.  Sharing is good.  Ehrenreich’s second op-ed piece, “A Homespun Safety Net” (7/12/09), offers examples of the “rich networks of reciprocal giving and support” among the poor.  In contrast our nation’s official welfare system is suspicious, grudging, punitive, and full of barriers.  Mug shots, fingerprinting, background checks, long interrogations about the paternity of one’s children all make applying for welfare “a lot like being booked by the police,” in the words of one law school professor.  Benefits come with onerous requirements, like having to apply for 40 jobs a week and attend daily ‘job readiness’ classes without help for babysitting, gas, or tolls.  Ehrenreich tells of acts of mutual support and generosity among the poor that are truly inspiring.  But they’re not enough, she concludes, “There are limits to the generosity of relatives and friends.”  We simply cannot ask the crowds to fend for themselves.

The feeding of the 4000 in Mark 8 ends like the feeding of the 5000.

Mark 8:8 — “[All] ate and were filled; and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full.” 

First and foremost the feeding stories are about abundance.  There is more than enough for everyone.  This is a symbolic enactment of the kingdom of God.  God’s creation is meant to meet everyone’s needs.  But our world is one of increasing disparities and shortages.  The poor fall further behind no matter how the economy does.  Ehrenreich notes how boom times brought skyrocketing rents, loss of public housing, and sub-prime mortgages that devastated the urban poor.  And downturns inordinately threaten the poor who live on the edge.  Economist Timothy Smeeding reported in 2005 that “Americans have the highest income inequality in the rich world and over the past 20–30 years Americans have also experienced the greatest increase in income inequality among rich nations.” (Social Science Quarterly, 86, 956-983)  This trend has accelerated since 2005.

Something is very wrong.  That something is called structural injustice.  It’s built into the system and tilts the playing field against the poor and vulnerable in favor of those at the top, who use their wealth and influence to make the rules and enforce them.  These are “the bonds of injustice,” the “thongs of the yoke,” that Isaiah speaks against.  Ehrenreich’s third op-ed piece—“Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?” (8/9/09)—details some of the ways that, in her words, “In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates even more poverty.”  Cities are passing more and more laws against things like sitting or lying on a sidewalk, loitering,  begging, and even passing out food to the homeless.  Tempe, AZ, instituted a four-day campaign against the indigent.  Ehrenreich asks, “How do you know if someone is indigent”  She quotes a Las Vegas statute: “An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive public assistance.”  In one case, police arrested a man in a homeless shelter on an outstanding warrant for not appearing in court to face a charge of “criminal trespassing.”  His offense was sleeping on a sidewalk in a nearby suburb, so the police effectively arrested him for being homeless.  While in jail, he lost his slot in the shelter and now must sleep outside wherever he can.  For the homeless, failure to appear or failure to pay a fine can lead to an inescapable Catch-22 cycle, trapping them in bonds of injustice.

Ehrenreich’s fourth op-ed piece, “The Recession’s Racial Divide” (9/13/09), offers further instances of structural injustice illustrated by how “blacks are the ones taking the brunt of the recession with disproportionately high levels of foreclosures and unemployment.”  Thanks to a legacy of discrimination in both hiring and lending, blacks are already less likely than whites to have financial cushions like savings or retirement accounts.  In the years leading up to the current recession blacks were already falling ever further behind whites, with one-third of black children living in poverty and black unemployment—even among those with college degrees—consistently running at twice the level of whites.  Ehrenreich notes that “people of all races were sucked into sub-prime and adjustable-rate mortgages, but even high-income blacks were twice as likely to end up with sub-prime home purchase loans as low-income whites—even when they qualified for prime mortgages.”  Mortgage brokers worked through black preachers to market sub-prime loans to black parishioners by offering donations to the churches for each loan that went through..

Mark 9:35-37 & 42 — [Jesus] sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, ‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’ Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’  [And a little later he said to them,] ‘If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.

Remember that in Jesus’ time little children were, in fact, the weakest, most vulnerable of all people.  For Jesus and the prophets, the welfare those at the bottom was the prime measure of justice in a society.  We do not come off very well.  Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”  Isaiah calls God’s people to go beyond feeding and housing the hungry and homeless and to set free all those victimized by structures and systems of injustice.  So even as we engage in acts of charity like CROP Walk, we also we participate in Bread for the World’s Offering of Letters, seeking to change the rules and to reduce the levels of injustice in our world.  We seek to be peacemakers, working for the wholeness and harmony of God’s shalom.  And today we join in solidarity with Christians worldwide, gathering at the Lord’s Table to break the bread and pour the cup and set them before the people in witness that there is enough to go around for all.    We do all this for love of God and for love of neighbor.

Mark 12:28-31 — One of the scribes …asked Jesus, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Hear what the Spirit is saying to the church.

Amen and amen.