Sermon

INTRODUCTION: Last Fall, I was outed as a “liberal abuser” by a student in my upper division Civic Engagement class at FGCU. The issue: using a departmentally approved text that the student felt was too liberal. She outed me to a conservative student organization called CampusReform.org and received $100, which came from a $5 million grant from the Cato Institute. The Naples Daily News made it a front page story…although every other section of the required Civic Engagement course uses the text as well.

The truth is, though, she was and is right: the text is “very liberal.” So liberal that it includes some positive words about the American Communist Party, which is absolutely verboden in America. Specifically, the text reports that communists of the 1930s-era were instrumental in gaining support in Congress for Social Security, unemployment insurance, a national minimum wage and the eight-hour day.

Ironically, it was those very Roosevelt-inspired-pieces of legislation which transformed America, and potentially averted a revolution in America among the working class, many of whom were out of work and desperate. Nonetheless, our American view of the Stalin brand of communism is still true: It was brutal and inhumane. And its dialectical materialism, government sponsored atheism, and persecution of churches, did little to enamor it with any significant religious body.

But scroll forward from the 1930s to the 1960s. The Italian film director Pier Pasolini, an atheist and communist, was in Rome in 1965 and extremely bored. Vatican Council II was in full swing. The Eternal City was overrun with priests, religious, and 2.500 bishops. The events of the Council filled all the newspapers, radio and TV.

To combat his absolute boredom, Pasolini picked up the Gideon Bible near his bed. For the first time ever, he began to read the Christian New Testament, starting with The Gospel According to Matthew. He was profoundly affected. In fact, he read it as a deeply moving reflection of ancient class struggle between the working class and the power elite of Jesus’ day.

You may remember that the first line in The Communist Manifesto reads, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

So rather than seeing Matthew with traditional theological or anti-theological presuppositions, Pasolini saw the Christian scripture, the “Gospel of Matthew,” as a moving story of class struggle…of the poor and working class, fighting against an unresponsive interconnected power elite.

Pasolini had the blessing of no theological axes to grind, rather he saw Jesus in the context of the poor and as a revolutionary. The result was his widely proclaimed film, The Gospel According to Matthew. And strangely enough, people with widely varying theological beliefs, liberal and conservative, praised it for honestly reflecting the sacred text and Jesus’ concern for the lowest class, the poor.

Up until 10,000 years or so ago, our species took part in a hunter-gatherer sort of lifestyle. We lived in tribes. We went where the food was, where the environment supported hunters and food gatherers. In so doing we human beings spread throughout the world. One crucial descriptive fact to remember about this era, according to communism: The nomadic conditions of hunting and gathering did not permit the accumulation of wealth…of capital.

The first thing to change that was the domestication of horticulture – gardening – done mostly by women. That resulted in populations becoming larger, more dense and sedentary. Out of that evolved an agricultural way of life and – please note – the capacity to accumulate wealth.

With wealth came what’s called the domestication of workers. Rather than everyone in the tribe hunting and gathering, with horticulture in gardens and agriculture in fields, society came to be organized upon the basis of labor and property. Owners evolved as an elite class that utilized laborers, including women and children. Although women played the key role in the development of plant domestication, it was men who developed the art of what Marx called the exploiting of other humans and what Friedrich Engels called “the worldwide historical defeat of the female sex.”

According to communism, all systems of class rule are also systems of patriarchy – male dominated. The first slaves were women, and Third World women continue to form the most exploited sector of the international working class. Men have always staffed the institutions of class rule and men have always been the primary beneficiaries of class rule.

In the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, Marx contends that every society can be analyzed in terms of two basic and inseparably related structures:

First, there is the economic structure, with production, goods and services being produced by the masses for a small elite.

Second is the social superstructure which provides the laws, morality, religion, and the state. These support the status quo and guarantee a quiescent society in which the elite – the wealthy, the holders of capital – can pursue their economic interests; because their interests are defended by these institutions of society.

Against these kinds of injustices, Marx cried, “Workers of the world unite. You have only your chains to lose.”

By the 19^th century, when Marx and Engels were writing their revolutionary treatises, here’s what patriarchal capitalism had evolved into, as seen through the legislation of the English Parliament, which laws were designed to stop some of the Industrial Age’s worst expressions:

n Factory Act 1819: Limited the hours worked by children to a maximum of 12 per day. (That means they were working more than that and had to pass a law to make it illegal!)

n Factory Act 1833: Children under 9 were banned from working in the clothing industry and children ten to thirteen year’s old were limited to a 48 hour work week.

n Factory Act 1844: A maximum of 12 hours work per day for women was legislated.

n Factory Act 1850: Increased the hours worked by women and children to 10 ½ hours a day, but they were not allowed to work before 6 a.m. or after 6 p.m.

n Factory Act of 1874: No worker was allowed to work more than 56.5 hours per week. That adds up to seven days a week, eight hours a day.

That was the capitalism of the day and the gross abuse of the labor force, especially the working woman, children and men. It was what gave righteous energy to the communist cause.

Into this vortex came Karl Marx came from a famous family of rabbis, but his father had converted to Protestantism one year before Karl was born so as to be able to practice law because under Prussian law Jews were prohibited from doing so. And although we never think of religious and Marx, it was he who wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Though that has been the primary view attributed to Marx and religion, there is also a degree of compassion for the working class. In the context of their working conditions, opium might have been a welcome relief.

As you have heard me say before, none of the four gospels was written by eye-witnesses. The first one was probably written some 40 years after the death of Jesus, based upon the editor or redactor’s collecting of incidents that others had written or collected. That collection of documents might be thought of as a core source for all four writers, what liberal New Testament theologians call, the Q Gospel. Catholic theologian John Crossan takes Q and meshes it with the Gospel According to Thomas, which is not in our authorized Christian scriptures, part of which has this message about Jesus’ view of economics.

n Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again, I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. (A clear indictment of the upper class.)

n Do not fret, from morning to evening and from evening to morning, about what you are going to wear – you're much better than the lilies, which neither card nor spin; <to “card” means to comb out and clean fibres of wool or cotton before spinning> (It meant lack of clothing was a particular issue for the poor.)

n Foxes have their dens and birds have their nests, but too many human beings have no place to lie down and rest; (Homelessness did not originate in Lee County.)

n If you have money, don't lend it at interest – rather, give it to someone from whom you won't get it back. (The bible makes no qualifications whatsoever: Charging interest on money, on capital, is wrong, it says.)

For certain Jesus preached mostly to the poor, and identified himself with them. He charged everyone with the task of caring for one another, much as we care for ourselves.

And there’s nothing more prominent in Jesus’ message and ministry than one thing: giving to the other who is in need.

Have you ever wondered what to do with the person who catches you at a stop light and asks for money? Jesus said, “Give to him that begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you.” Matthew 5:42

But what if you can’t afford to give? Jesus said, “Give and it will be given unto you…For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” Luke 6:38

So how have we been the beneficiaries of capitalism and communism? And what about the mess we’re in as a nation? We are spending billions on a war in Iraq that even Karl Rove in his new book out this week, has admitted we should never have initiated. We’re spending billions upon billions to create a new social order in ancient Afghanistan, and yet last night, more than 800 families slept in their cars in Lee County – a drop in the national bucket. More than 100,000 people requested and received a free lunch at the Soup Kitchen last year.

The Great Recession which we hope is beginning to end was the result of greed gone to seed. We will be paying for its impact for decades to come. Hopefully, there will be a safety net to care for those whose lives have been devastated. For certain, that means health care, jobs and houses.

I grew up in a different time. My father was a minister who felt called to help churches that were struggling or trying to start. By the time I was in the 5^th grade, due to moves across Texas and Oklahoma, I was in my 6^th school, this time in the little town of Tuttle, Oklahoma, population, less than 1,000. Mother and Dad were ministers at a little Pentecostal Holiness Church right next to the railroad track. It was an all white exterior, a shotgun type of church building in which the front door opened directly into a small worship space; in back there were three rooms including a kitchen, with a path instead of a bath. On Sundays, the rooms became classrooms.

Although there were seven of us – and my older brother was only home on weekends while attending Bible College – I didn’t know better than to think of it as quite adequate. I liked the train next door, and felt it was neat to have church so close. We had been there just a couple of months, when Dad left to help his minister brother in California start a new church, which left mother caring for our family, preaching and pastoring the church.

During this time, one light, snowy November morning, I left home to walk the few blocks to school, as I always did. We hadn’t been in class very long, until our teacher, Mrs. Lomax, left the room and said she was going to the principal’s office. When she came back with him, she asked me to join them in the hall.

The principal then asked me to go for a ride with him and he drove me in his Jeep back across town and over the railroad tracks to the church I called home. We went to the back door of the church, which was our front door, and he knocked. Mother answered, and he introduced himself and she invited us in. He asked her, did she know that I had come to school without any shoes and there was snow on the ground?

I interrupted to explain that my shoes hurt my feet, and besides I liked to go barefooted. I don’t remember much more, except that my principal gave Mother some money and left. After he was gone, Mother started crying and that made me feel really bad. With four kids, two of them preschool age, she hadn’t realized I had made an executive decision to go barefooted rather than wear shoes that hurt my feet. She found them and some socks, and made me put them on. She checked to see and indeed they were too small. Then she bundled my sisters up and we went to a store that had shoes and she bought me a pair.

After lunch I went back to school wearing my new shoes. Ms Lomax told me how nice they looked, and soon I was back in the swing of things.

I don’t remember my principal’s name. I don’t know how much money he gave mother. But as I look back, I realize the impact of what he had done. I’ve wished he could have known how much that act still means to me all these years later.

We can talk about Jesus and Marx; we can debate endlessly on what the government should be doing and what it should stop doing. But most times, it comes down to one man or one woman, maybe a teacher or a principal, to someone who has been influenced by the church, the synagogue or the mosque, to care for others…who wants to help, who leaves some money with a mother to buy her little boy shoes. It’s the message of Jesus in support of the poor…the revolutionary whom Karl Marx supported.

[1] Presented March 07, 2010 at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, located at 2756 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, FL, temporarily meeting at the Crestwell School, 1910 Park Meadow, with the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.