“How can gasoline go up in price $.25 in five days due to the speculation in the Middle East when it can take months for crude oil to be extracted, transported and refined into gasoline?” “How is it that as one war (Iraq) winds down the drumbeat begins for another (Iran)?” “How is it 7,000 people sleep on the streets each night in the 22nd wealthiest county (Santa Clara) in the United States?”
And why do such questions seem so inappropriate from a preacher?
It may seem out-of-bounds to ask such questions when we don’t have answers. At least answers that fit in neat and tidy sound bites.
“Don’t mix politics with religion!” We hear that usually from those who disagree with our concerns. Those who agree call it “prophetic”; I’m not sure that is any more accurate.
People who are dealing with the death or illness of a loved one, the tensions of marriage and family, or the uncertainty of economic options come to church for comfort and peace, guidance in how to love each other. They don’t want to hear about issues out of their control which bother them just as much as me. We get that.
Yet the Biblical tradition would suggest that economic justice, war and the suffering of the poor are spiritual concerns.
Consider this: During the French revolution in the 18th century, or last year's Egyptian Revolution which saw the public overthrow of the Mubarak 30 year dictatorship, political violence was partially fueled by the price of bread, keyed by the huge increase in food grain prices.
Between June 2010 and June 2011, world grain prices almost doubled. In many places on this planet, that proved an unmitigated catastrophe. In those same months, several governments fell, rioting broke out in cities from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to Nairobi, Kenya, and most disturbingly, three new wars began in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Even on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, Bedouin tribes are now in revolt against the country's interim government and manning their own armed roadblocks.
And in each of these situations, the initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread. If these upheavals were not "resource conflicts" in the formal sense of the term, think of them at least as bread-triggered upheavals. ("Political Stability and the Price of Bread", Christian Parenti, MotherJones, 7/19/2011)
We think of bread as the simplest, most mundane form of food. Yet its production, distribution and consumption can have the most profound of effects. That is as true today as it was in ancient times.
When Jesus is tempted by the Devil to turn stones into bread during Jesus' forty day fast in preparation for his ministry in Galilee (Luke 4:1-4), the writer of the gospel of Luke may be referring indirectly to the Roman occupation forces' common practice of bread distributions to "win the hearts and minds" of the colonized poor. Immediately following Jesus' rejection..."one does not live by bread alone..." Satan offers Jesus unlimited political power over all the kingdoms of the world, which this too is rejected by the Nazarene.
Jesus' proclamation of the long promised Kingdom of God as present in his life and teaching (Luke 4:16-30), and spiritually available to all who would follow (Mark 1:14-15), does not require, nor can be reduced to, political gimmickry and power.
In his insightful book, The Greatest Prayer (HarperOne, NY, 2010), professor John Dominic Crossan applies one of his consistent hermeneutical themes to the Lord's Prayer phrase "...give us this day our daily bread..." He suggests that the gospel story of Jesus is the confrontation between the Hebrew eschatological faith in the reign of God versus the empire and worldview of Rome.
...who owns the earth, the land and the lake [Sea of Galilee/Lake Tiberias]...God or Rome...and who, therefore, owns the food produced by earth land, and lake. If '...the earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it' (Psalm 24:1)...if, as God claims, 'the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants' (Lev. 25:23), who owns the means of food production? From where does our food really come? (Crossan, p. 126).
In his book Crossan catalogues scriptural references to food in the struggle for and by the poor for a fair share of God's creation and the blessings intended (Genesis 1:1-f). He concludes that all the stories of food and fish, meals and miracles of feeding, insist that "...it is always about God's food in God's world for God's people." (Crossan p.137).
This is especially true in reference to Jesus' instruction to pray "...give us this day our daily bread..." When we give thanks to God for the food we are about to eat, our blessing doesn't make it sacred. Rather we are reclaiming it "for God to whom it had always belonged." (Crossan, p. 130)
The Lord's Prayer may be the most universal of Christian practice today. Yet what about Crossan's assertion that it is a call for a counter-cultural rejection of systemic power and greed?
According to the United Nations World Food Program, nearly one billion people on earth suffer from malnutrition today; 24,000, mainly women and children, die each day of malnutrition related disease. Yet there is more than enough food on earth to feed everyone. People aren't hungry because there is a scarcity of food; for example, India, where there are more hungry children than any other nation on earth, is an exporter of rice and wheat.1
People are hungry because of poverty; they can't afford to buy food or the land on which to produce it for themselves. Economic and political structures have dramatically decreased the amount of malnutrition in the world in the last 100 years. Yet severe hunger and poverty remain the existence for too many of the world's population, in part due to economic and political structures invested in systems that allow and in certain circumstances encourage hunger.
When people in the 21st century riot over increases in the price of bread, or decreases in its distribution, it is not just about the food. It’s about the inequality of power, status and opportunity. For those whose traditions celebrate the created order as divinely inspired and maintained, designed to provide enough for all of God's children (Genesis 1:1-f), injustice in the control and distribution of bread is an affront to God.2
That being the case it would be wrong for a preacher, or any disciple for that matter, not to say something in the face of the powers and greed that perpetuate economic injustice, poverty and war.
Even if we don't have all the answers...or even some of the wrong ones...faithful people have got to ask "why?"
1 Because of the size of its population India’s poor make up 41% of all the world’s poor, living on a $1 a day (NationMaster.com); 44% of its children under 5 are underweight due to malnutrition, the largest number of all nations. A third of all the malnourished children in the world live in India, an exporter of rice and wheat (World Bank, 2006).