Email Your Senators-Extend Unemployment & Health Care Benefits

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  On Tuesday President Obama signed the historic health care reform bill. David Leonhardt wrote <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=OIyxEYwUOFKDiNpKyfRLSobrghIjwO9H>  in the New York Times, "The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government's biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago." 

 Yet we still face massive long-term unemployment, and once again unemployed workers face the loss of their lifeline for survival. The February stop-gap measure <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=FzJImlYgreXg2adhcyBxDIbrghIjwO9H>  of federal extensions of unemployment insurance and subsidies for COBRA health care are set to expire on April 5 unless the Senate acts this week. Most Republicans and Democrats agree this extension is needed. But the Senate will spend this entire week debating additional health care measures passed by the House, and then go on a two-week recess. The Senate must pass the extension by unanimous consent now, or it won't get to a vote until after workers have lost their benefits.

 Click here <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=eyeACDDyze7S%2BIXetyrc4obrghIjwO9H>  to take action now!

 

Sikhs Regain Right To Wear Turbans In U.S. Army : NPR

Sikhs Regain Right To Wear Turbans In U.S. Army : NPR: "U.S. Army Capt. Tejdeep Singh Rattan is making history.

This week, Rattan, who is an American Sikh, completed his nine-week basic officer training course at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas — making him the first American Sikh officer in the U.S. Army in more than 25 years"

Heads Up: Prayer Warriors and Sarah Palin Are Organizing Spiritual Warfare to Take Over America | Investigations | AlterNet

Heads Up: Prayer Warriors and Sarah Palin Are Organizing Spiritual Warfare to Take Over America | Investigations | AlterNet: "Imagine a religious movement that makes geographic maps of where demons reside and claims among its adherents the Republican Party's most recent vice presidential nominee and whose leaders have presided over prayer sessions (one aimed at putting the kibosh on health-care reform) with a host of leading GOP figures."

Sharing the Wealth: The Church as Biblical Model for Public Policy

by Ronald J. Sider

Ronald J. Sider is president of Evangelicals for Social Action and a professor of theology at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. This article appeared in the Christian Century June 8-15, 1977, p. 560. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

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What is the biblical view of God’s will for economic relations among his people? For an answer, we shall look at the jubilee passage in Leviticus, at the new community of Jesus’ disciples, at the first church in Jerusalem, and at the Pauline collection.

Text:

To ask government to legislate what the church cannot persuade its members to live is a tragic absurdity. That the church has tried to do precisely this is one of the most glaring weaknesses of its commendable, sometimes costly involvement in social action in the past two decades.

Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder tells of a meeting of church leaders held in an embattled Chicago suburb in the ‘60s. Blacks were marching to demand an end to de facto housing segregation. Wanting to help, the clergy met to devise a strategy for bringing pressure on the city’s business and political leadership to yield to black demands. After listening for an hour or so to various economic and political schemes, Yoder raised a question. Were not the bank presidents and the mayor active church members? They were, the clergy agreed but they were puzzled at Yoder’s irrelevant query. It was not at all obvious to those concerned clergy that the church must first demonstrate in its common life together what it calls on secular society to embody in public policy.

In danger of repeating the same mistake is today’s movement of concern among church people for world hunger and injustice in the international economic order. Economic relationships in our Lord’s worldwide body today constitute a desecration of his body and blood. Only as groups of believers in North America and Europe dare to incarnate in their life together what the Bible teaches about economic relationships among the people of God do they have any right to demand that leaders in Washington or Westminster shape a new world economic order.

What is the biblical view of God’s will for economic relations among his people? For an answer, we shall look at the jubilee passage in Leviticus, at the new community of Jesus’ disciples, at the first church in Jerusalem, and at the Pauline collection.

Leviticus 25 is one of the most radical texts in all Holy Writ. Every 50 years, God said, he wanted all land to return to the original owners -- without compensation. Physical handicaps, death of a breadwinner, or less natural ability might bring some people to become poorer than others. But God did not want such disadvantages to lead to greater and greater extremes of wealth and poverty among his people. Hence a means was prescribed to equalize land ownership every 50 years (Lev. 24:10-24).

Before and after the year of jubilee, land could be ‘bought” or ‘sold.” But since Yahweh was the owner (v. 23), what the buyer actually purchased was a specific number of harvests, not the land itself (v. 16). And woe betide the person who tried to make a killing by demanding what the market would bear rather than a just price for the intervening harvests from the date of purchase to the next jubilee (vv. 16-17). Yahweh is Lord -- even of economics. No hint here of some sacred law of supply and demand, a law independent of biblical ethics and the lordship of Yahweh. The people of God submit to Yahweh’s lordship, and he demands structures that foster economic justice among his people.

Unfortunately, we do not know whether the people of Israel ever practiced the year of jubilee. The absence of references to jubilee in the historical books of the Old Testament suggests that it may never have been implemented. Nevertheless, Leviticus 25 challenges us as a part of canonical truth.

Jesus’ Sharing Community

Jesus walked the roads and footpaths of Galilee announcing the startling news that the long-expected kingdom of peace and righteousness was at hand. Economic relationships in the new community of his followers were a powerful sign confirming this awesome announcement.

The Hebrew prophets had inspired the hope of a future messianic kingdom of peace, righteousness and justice. The essence of the good news which Jesus proclaimed was that the expected kingdom had come. Certainly Jesus disappointed popular Jewish expectations. He did not recruit an army to drive out the Roman oppressors. But neither did he remain alone as an isolated, individualistic prophet. He called and trained disciples. He established a visible community of people joined together by their loyalty to him as Lord. His new community began to live the values of the promised kingdom which was already breaking into the present. As a result, all relationships -- even economic ones -- were transformed in the community of Jesus’ followers.

Jesus and his disciples shared a common purse administered by Judas, who bought provisions and gave to the poor at Jesus’ direction (John 12:6, 19:29). This new community of sharing did not end with Jesus and the Twelve, for it included a number of women whom Jesus had healed. Traveling with Jesus and the disciples, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna “and many others . . . provided for them out of their means” (Luke 8: 1-3).

From this perspective, some of Jesus’ words gain new meaning and power. Consider Jesus’ advice to the rich young man in this context:

When Jesus asked the rich young man to sell his goods and give to the poor, he did not say, “Become destitute and friendless.” Rather, he said, “Come, follow me” (Matt. 19:21). In other words, he invited him to join a community of sharing and love, where his security would not be based on individual property holdings, but on openness to the Spirit and on the loving care of new-found brothers and sisters [Richard K. Taylor, Economics and the Gospel (United Church Press, 1973), p.21].

Jesus invited the rich young man to share in a new kind of security -- the joyful common life of the new kingdom.

Jesus’ words in Mark 10:29-30 have long puzzled me: “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (emphasis added; see also Matt. 6:25-33). To me, Jesus’ promise used to seem at least a trifle naïve. But his words come alive with new meaning when they are read in the context of the new community of his followers. Jesus inaugurated a new social order -- a new kingdom of faithful followers who were to share unlimited liability for one another.

In that kind of community, there would truly be genuine economic security. One would indeed receive 100 times more loving brothers and sisters than before. The economic resources available in difficult times would be compounded. In fact, all the resources of the entire community of obedient disciples would be available to anyone in need. To be sure, that kind of unselfish, sharing life style would challenge surrounding society so pointedly that there would be persecutions. But even in the most desperate days, the promise would not be empty. Even if persecution led to death, children of martyred parents would receive new mothers and fathers in the community of believers. In the community of the redeemed, all relationships are being transformed. The common purse shared by Jesus and his first followers vividly demonstrates that Jesus repeated and deepened the old covenant’s call for transformed economic relationships among God’s people.

The Jerusalem Church

However embarrassing it may be to some today, the massive economic sharing of the earliest Christian church is indisputable (see, for example, Acts 2:43-47, 4:32-37, 5-1-11, 6:1-7). Whenever anyone was in need, all shared. Giving surplus income to the needy was not enough. The Jerusalem Christians regularly dipped into capital reserves, selling property to aid those in need. God’s promise to Israel that faithful obedience would eliminate poverty among his people (Deut. 15:4) came true in the new church:

“There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them . . . and distribution was made to each as any had need” (Acts 4:34-35).

Two millennia later, the texts still throb with the first Christian community’s joy and excitement. They ate meals together “with glad and generous hearts” (Acts 2:46). They experienced an exciting unity as all sensed they “were of one heart and soul” (Acts 4:32). They were not isolated individuals struggling alone to follow Jesus. A new community transforming all areas of life became a joyful reality. The earliest Jerusalem Christians experienced such oneness in Christ that they promptly undertook extensive economic sharing.

What was the precise nature of the Jerusalem Christians’ costly koinonia? They did not insist on absolute economic equality. Nor did they abolish private property. Sharing was voluntary, not compulsory. But love for brothers and sisters was so overwhelming that many freely abandoned legal claims to private possessions. “ No one said that any of the things which he possessed was his own” (Acts 4:32). That does not mean that everyone donated everything, but whenever there was need, believers regularly sold lands and houses to aid the needy.

The essence of these transformed economic relationships in the Jerusalem church is unlimited liability and total availability. The sharing was not superficial or occasional. Regularly and repeatedly (as the imperfect tense of the verbs in the relevant passage of Scripture suggests) the believers sold possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need” (Acts 4:35). The needs of the sister or brother were decisive. In the new messianic community of Jesus’ first followers after Pentecost, God was redeeming all relationships. The result was unconditional economic liability for and total financial availability to the other brothers and sisters in Christ. The first Christians dared to give concrete, visible expression to the oneness of all believers.

Whatever the beauty and appeal of such a picture, however, was it not a vision that quickly faded? Many people believe so. But the Pauline collection proves exactly the contrary.

The Pauline Collection

Paul broadened the vision of economic sharing among the people of God in a dramatic way. He devoted a great deal of time to raising money for Jewish Christians among gentile congregations. In the process, he broadened intrachurch assistance into interchurch sharing among all the scattered congregations of believers. Furthermore, with Peter and Paul, biblical religion moved beyond one ethnic group and became a universal, multiethnic faith. Paul’s collection for Jews from gentiles demonstrates that the oneness of the new body of believers entails dramatic economic sharing across ethnic and geographical lines.

For several years, Paul gave much time and energy to his great collection for the Jerusalem church. He discussed his concern in several letters, and he arranged for the collection in the churches of Macedonia, Galatia, Asia, Corinth, Ephesus and probably elsewhere.

Paul knew he faced certain danger and possible death, but he still insisted on personally accompanying the offering for the Jerusalem church (Acts 21:4, 10-14; Rom. 15:31). Out of his passionate commitment to economic sharing with brothers and sisters came his final arrest and martyrdom. Yet he had a deep conviction that this financial symbol of Christian unity mattered far more than even his life. His understanding of Christian koinonia -- an extremely important concept in Paul’s theology -- is central in his discussion of the collection.

The word koinonia means fellowship with, or participation in, something or someone. Believers enjoy fellowship with the Lord Jesus (I Cor. 1:9). Experiencing the koinonia of Jesus means having his righteousness imputed to us. It also entails sharing in the self-sacrificing, cross-bearing life he lived (Phil. 3:8-10). Nowhere is the Christian’s fellowship with Christ experienced more powerfully than in the Eucharist, where the believer is drawn into a participation (koinonia) in the mystery of the cross: The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (I Cor. 10:16)

Paul’s immediate inference -- in the very next verse -- is that koinonia with Christ inevitably involves koinonia with all the members of his body. “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (v. 17). As he taught in Ephesians 2, Christ’s death for Jew and gentile, male and female, has broken down all ethnic, cultural and sexual divisions. In Christ there is one new person, one new body of believers. When the brothers and sisters share the one bread and the common cup in the Lord’s Supper, they symbolize and actualize their participation in the one body of Christ.

That is why the class divisions at Corinth so horrified Paul. Wealthy Christians, apparently, were feasting at the eucharistic celebrations while poor believers went hungry. Paul angrily denied that they were eating the Lord’s body and blood because they did not discern his body (vv. 27-29). By this Paul meant that they failed to realize that their membership in the one body of Christ was infinitely more important than the class or ethnic differences which divided them. One brings judgment on oneself if one does not perceive that eucharistic fellowship with Christ is totally incompatible with living a practical denial of that unity of all believers in his body. As long as one Christian anywhere in the world is hungry, the eucharistic celebration of all Christians everywhere is incomplete.

For Paul, this intimate fellowship in the body of Christ had concrete economic implications. Paul used precisely this word koinonia to designate financial sharing among believers. Sometimes he employed the word as a virtual synonym for “collection.” he spoke of the liberality of the fellowship that the Corinthians’ generous offering would demonstrate (II Cor. 9:13). He employed the same language to report the Macedonian Christians’ offering for Jerusalem (Rom. 15:26).

Paul’s guideline for what sharing should be in the body of believers is startling: “I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of equality your abundance at the present time should supply their want, so that their abundance may supply your want, that there may be equality” (II Cor. 8:13-14; emphasis added). To support his principle, Paul quoted from the biblical story of the manna: “As it is written, ‘He who gathered much had nothing over, and he who gathered little had no lack’ ” (v. 15). It may indeed seem startling to rich Christians in the northern hemisphere, but Paul -- in guiding the Corinthians in their giving -- clearly enunciated the principle of economic equality among the worldwide people of God.

Pattern for Today’s Church

However interesting it may be, what relevance does the economic sharing at Jerusalem and Corinth have for the contemporary church?

Certainly the church today need not slavishly imitate every detail of the life of the early church depicted in Acts. But that does not mean that we can simply dismiss the economic sharing described in Acts and the Pauline letters.

Over and over again God specifically commanded his people to live together in community in such a way that they would avoid extremes of wealth and poverty -- that is the point of the Old Testament legislation on the jubilee and sabbatical years, on tithing, gleaning and loans. Jesus, our only perfect model, shared a common purse with the new community of his disciples. The first church in Jerusalem and Paul in his collection were implementing what the Old Testament and Jesus had commanded.

The powerful evangelistic impact of the economic sharing at Jerusalem indicates that God approved and blessed the practice. When Scripture calls for transformed economic relations among God’s people in some places, and describes God’s blessing on his people as they implement these commands in other places, then we can be sure that we have discovered a normative pattern for the church today.

What is striking, in fact, is the fundamental continuity of biblical teaching on this point. Paul’s collection was simply an application of the basic principle of the jubilee. The mechanism, of course, was different because God’s people were now a multiethnic body living in different lands. But the principle was the same. Since the Greeks at Corinth were now part of the people of God, they were to share with the poor Jewish Christians at Jerusalem -- that there might be equality!

Living the Biblical Model

What does the biblical teaching on economic relationships among God’s people mean for Christians striving for a new international economic order in our own time?

Central to any Christian strategy on world hunger must be a radical call for the church to be the church. As was noted at the beginning, one of the most glaring weaknesses of church social action in the past few decades has been its too exclusive focus on political solutions. In effect, church leaders tried to persuade government to legislate what they could not persuade their church members to live. And politicians quickly sensed that the daring resolutions and the frequent Washington delegations represented generals without troops. Only if the body of Christ is already beginning to live a radically new model of economic sharing will our demand for political change have integrity and impact.

We must confess the tragic sinfulness of present economic relationships in the worldwide body of Christ. While our brothers and sisters in the Third World ache for lack of minimal health care, minimal education, even just enough food to escape starvation, Christians in the northern hemisphere grow richer each year -- like the Corinthian Christians who feasted without sharing their food with the poor members of the church (I Cor. 11:20-29). Like them we fail today to discern the reality of Christ’s body. U.S. Christians spent $5.7 billion on new church construction alone in the six years from 1967 to 1972. Would we go on building lavish church plants if members of our own congregations were starving? Do we not flatly contradict Paul’s instructions to the early churches if we live as though African or Latin American members of his body are less a part of us than the members of our home congregations?

But what concretely might a wholehearted recognition of the oneness of Christ’s body mean? It would mean a massive discipling process in the churches, so that individual Christians would start living more simple life styles. Shouldn’t it be the norm, rather than the exception, for Christians to be involved in small weekly fellowship/worship/action groups where mutual discipling is a regular practice? Where Christians can, for example, evaluate each other’s income-tax returns and family budgets, discuss major purchases, and gently nudge each other toward life styles more in keeping with their worship of a God who sides with the poor?

Churches, likewise, would need to adopt more simple corporate life styles. Virtually all church construction today is unnecessary. At least three large congregations could easily share every church building if one group would worship on Saturday evening, another Sunday morning, and a third on Sunday evening. The heart of each congregation might be in small discipling groups, such as I have described, meeting in homes. Significantly simpler personal and ecclesiastical life styles would make assistance for economic development possible on an astonishingly increased scale. A small denomination of 50,000 members could by itself establish two new agencies the size of Church World Service, or two new Mennonite Central Committees, or one new World Vision. The Church of the Nazarene (with half a million members) could start 20 new agencies the size of Church World Service. The United Methodists (with 9.9 million members) could establish 400 new Church World Services!

Nor am I calling for poverty. In 1974 the median income of U.S. families was $12,836. Charitable donations to “religion” normally run at about 3 per cent ($385). Were a family of five to spend $10,000 of its total income on itself, it would have to cut out many luxuries, but it would still have a comfortable life style that would appear aristocratic to all but a tiny fraction of the world’s people. That leaves $2,451 extra per family available for ending poverty (those with incomes above the median could give more and those below, less). Assuming five-member families, a church with 50,000 members would have at least 10,000 family groups that could give $24,510,000. The cash disbursements of Church World Service in 1974 were about $11.5 million; MCC’s, $9 million; World Vision’s, about $20 million.

Now I do not mean to suggest that I expect this to happen, or that if a simpler life style were widely accepted all the newly available funds ought to go toward fighting poverty. What the figures are meant to demonstrate is that if Christians dared to change the ways they live, their increased giving could make a significant difference. In fact, a mere 10 million Christians in the U.S. could annually provide tile total $5 billion in foreign funds needed by developing countries, according to the 1974 World Food Congress, for investment in rural agricultural development. In 1974, 32 per cent of all U.S. economic aid to developing countries came from private contributions. If even one-fourth of all U.S. Christians had been following the formula spelled out above, the percentage of private contributions would have jumped drastically.

Daring to Live What We Ask

No one is naïve enough to suppose that vastly increased aid from U.S. churches -- to both church and nonchurch groups in developing countries -- could proceed without problems. Certainly there would need to be strenuous efforts to avoid paternalism and prevent dependency. Long-term development and self-sufficiency would be tile goal. Obviously there would be difficulties; but the Third World church leaders I have talked with insist that these obstacles could be overcome far more easily than can our unwillingness to share.

The emphasis placed here on simpler personal and ecclesiastical life styles is by no means intended to belittle the importance of changing public policy. (Note, however, that living the new model would deeply affect the U.S. economy; and the powerful example of sharing could also profoundly influence the thinking and life style of non-Christians.) Certainly we should strengthen organizations like Bread for the World. Certainly we should work politically to demand costly concessions from Washington in international forums working to reshape the International Monetary Fund, as well as new policy in trade negotiations on tariffs, commodity agreements and the like. Certainly we must ask whether far more sweeping structural changes are necessary. However, our attempt to restructure secular society will possess integrity only if our personal life styles -- and our corporate ecclesiastical practices in local congregations, in regions and denominations, and in the worldwide body of Christians demonstrate that we are already daring to live what we ask Washington to legislate.

A radical call to repentance so that the church becomes the church must be central to Christian strategies for reducing world hunger and restructuring international economic relationships. The church is the most universal body in the world today. It has the opportunity to live a new corporate model of economic sharing at a desperate moment in world history. If even one-quarter of the Christians in the northern hemisphere had the courage to live the biblical vision of economic equality, the governments of our dangerously divided global village might also be persuaded to legislate the sweeping changes needed to avert disaster.

source: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1166

How the Early Church Practiced Charity

Upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, former president Jimmy Carter remarked that the "growing gap between the rich and poor" is the most elemental problem facing the world economy. But the gap between the rich and the poor is also a very old problem. Princeton historian Peter Brown takes up this issue of care for the poor as it was practiced in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era.

As usual, Brown combines erudition with an elegant style and makes his argument readily accessible. His concern with the social location of poverty is part of his larger effort to understand the character of Christianity as it negotiated its place in a still durable classical culture. The interface of classical and Christian culture has its obvious pivot point in Augustine, of whom Brown has written a classic study

Brown begins by contrasting classical and Christian notions of care for society. In the former, euergesia (to do good) was a practice of the wealthy, who contributed to the well-being of society. Their giving was a much-celebrated civic virtue. But their contributions were given to an undifferentiated cultural system that made no social distinctions on the basis of need. Consequently, the poor were never visible.

Christians, on the other hand -- and especially bishops -- were charged to be "lovers of the poor," a category that comprised both those poor in fact ("deep poverty") and those who lived under the constant threat of poverty ("shallow poverty"). Such care constituted a major change in "social imagination," Brown says. "In a sense, it was the Christian bishops who invented the poor. They rose to leadership in late Roman society by bringing the poor into ever-sharper focus."

Brown does not oversimplify or sentimentalize the bishops’ achievement. He observes that with the conversion of Constantine, which made Christianity the official religion of the empire, bishops were invested with social significance and huge financial resources, and were obligated to give evidence of a responsible use of this entitlement. "The clergy could be called to account by the state if they failed to make use of their privileges for the benefit of the poor." As a consequence, the bishops funded hospitals and houses of care that were concerned especially with the poor.

Brown observes that the main body of the church was made up of "middling persons" who were not wealthy but who made modest but steady contributions to the church’s support of the poor. This means of funding was quite a contrast to the classical pattern of the wealthy giving large gifts. The church also had to make an effort to support and sustain this "middling" constituency, which itself was always under the threat of falling into poverty.

The sustained effort to care for the poor that came to characterize the church is derived, Brown suggests, from "an ancient Near Eastern model of justice" mediated through the church’s liturgical use of the Old Testament. The Old Testament tradition accented the legitimate "cry" of the poor that elicited a response of "justice" from the powerful.

Brown appeals particularly to the word play of Isaiah 5:7: the monumental clarity and poetic elegance of the juxtaposition of the term z’daqah, "the cry," with its remedy, ze ‘aqah, "justice." This was not lost on the great Hebraist, Saint Jerome. The movement from "cry" to "justice" conveyed a~ ethos of justice -- firm, paternal and mercifully swift -- that appealed to many humble late Roman people who found themselves living in a postclassical world in which Old Testament conditions reigned.

"I would suggest that an almost subliminal reception of the Hebrew Bible, through the chanting of the Psalms and through the solemn injunctions of the bishop in connection with the episcopalis audientia, came to offer a meaning to the word pauper very different from the ‘pauperized’ image of the merely ‘economic’ poor. The pauper was a person with a claim upon the great. As with the poor of Israel, those who used the court of the bishop and attended his church also expected to call upon him, in time of need, for justice and protection," Brown writes.

As the bishops developed ways to make this concern front and center in the church, a passion for the poor began to "seep out of the churches" into the horizons and practices of the empire. The language of cry-justice "added a novel tincture to the language of public relations. It became a language that was increasingly found to be apposite to describe the quality of the relation of the emperor to his subjects, and of the weak to the powerful." Thus over time the advocacy of the church began to redefine relationships between the wealthy and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, well beyond the confines of the church.

In his final chapter Brown observes that the growing appreciation of the legitimacy of the cry of the poor created a social awareness that the powerful were obligated to provide justice and protection for the poor. Through the work of the bishops the poor were given a voice that created "an advocacy revolution" and eventually a "culture of criticism." Brown observes that "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." Through the church, the neediest were given permission to squeak!

This rhetorical revolution not only redefined the relationship of the rich and the poor, it also redefined the relationship of the believer to God. God could be addressed with urgent petitions as a matter of right.

Brown delighted this reviewer with his appreciation of the Psalter and would delight any right-minded Calvinist with his appreciation of Karl Barth’s statement in Church Dogmatics IV, 2: as a poor man, writes Barth, Christ "shares as such the strange destiny which falls on God in His people and the world -- to be the One who is ignored and forgotten and despised and discounted by men.

Brown finishes with a remarkable discussion of the Christology of Nestorius and Cyril of Alexandria in their effort to sort out both the distance and solidarity between the Father and Son by comparing it to the distance between God and believer and between rich and poor. The accent is upon solidarity. Brown argues that the rhetorical revolution that legitimated the cry of the needy transformed all relationships away from earlier modes in which the poor were mute and invisible.

The church still has a chance to employ such rhetoric in a technological society that wants to deny a voice to all those who live "outside the program." Brown does not make any "contemporary extrapolation" from his study, and we should not expect a disciplined historian to do so. In his final two sentences, however, he recognizes the contemporary urgency that is intrinsic to his argument: "The hope of solidarity itself, and the recognition of its attendant burdens, still weighs upon us today It has remained a fragile aspiration, as much in need of condensation into symbolic forms of requisite density and imaginative power as it ever was in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries of the Common Era."

Of course, the interface of Christianity with classical culture is very different from the church’s interface with the current U.S. economic-military hegemony and the shameless power of the market to damage human communities. Yet the parallels are suggestive enough that we might consider the accomplishment of those ancient bishops as instructive for the contemporary church.

Those who champion an undifferentiated "market society" shrilly shout "class war" if one suggests that the poor are a distinct social presence. If the poor can remain unrecognized, then no special effort on their behalf is required. I imagine that the practitioners of the old civic virtue of euergesia thought the same thing. But the Christian bishops, fed by the rhetoric of the Psalter, insisted upon a differentiation that denied the illusion of social cohesion.

The contemporary church has important allies in its attentiveness to the poor -- allies like Derek Bok, who in The Trouble with Government gives us statistics that make the plight of the poor inescapably vivid. He reminds us, for example, that "5.3 million households in 1995 consisted of ‘very low-income renters’ who received no federal housing assistance and either lived in severely substandard housing or paid half or more of their reported income for rent." Or like Lewis H. Lapham, who in the December 2002 issue of Harper’s points out that the "grotesque maldistribution of the country’s wealth over the last 30 years has brought forth a class system fully outfitted with the traditional accessories of complacence, stupidity and pride."

Most poignantly, in her report on her firsthand experience with systemic poverty, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich makes us see "poverty as acute distress: The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to faintness before the end of the shift. The ‘home’ that is also a car or a van. The illness or injury that must be ‘worked through,’ with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick pay or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next."

Ehrenreich writes that the appropriate emotional response to systemic poverty "is shame -- shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on -- when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently -- then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health and her life. The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society."

In addition to paying attention to such allies, the church can also follow the lead of the ancient bishops by accomplishing a revolution in rhetoric. In a linguistically flat technological society the church can return to the "mother tongue" of scriptural poetry and prayer, through which we learn to hear the cry of the needy and to understand that they must receive justice. To do so requires liberals to quit speaking and reasoning like social scientists. It requires conservatives to quit appealing to philosophic certitudes. It invites conservatives and liberals together to reembrace the dangerous rhetoric of covenantal interaction.

For all of the new imperial social entitlements they received, the ancient bishops -- even with mixed motives -- insisted on being who they were: teachers of the gospel. They could not and did not evade the imaginative alternative of gospel truth. And they demonstrated how the primal language of the church could perform as a public language.

source: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2700

Open Mic Night and Community Supper - Friday March 12th

Have you written a new poem? Just learned to play the guitar? Have a band
looking for a place to play? Looking for an evening of entertainment and
fun? This Friday the place for you is the Mor Gregorios Community Center and
their Open Mic Night.

Everyone is invited to the Mor Gregorios Community Center¹s next Open Mic
Night, Friday, March 12, starting at 7:00 PM. The Community Center will
also host a free supper of homemade soup and more starting at 6:00 PM. It
is an evening of food, entertainment, fun, and friends and neighbors.

All levels are invited to perform from beginners to advance. Poets,
jugglers, musicians, singers, comedians are all invited. If your talent is
just listening and having fun, you are encouraged to attend. The Open Mic
starts at 7:00 pm in the Great Room. You do not need a talent to attend and
be entertained. If your talent is listening, you are also invited. The
evening¹s entertainment is free.

The center¹s computer center will also be open that evening.

The Mor Gregorios Community Center is located at 1000 South Michigan Street,
Plymouth, Indiana. The center is located in the white A-frame building on
the corner of Oak Hill and Michigan streets across from the Webster
Elementary School.

For more information, you can call the center at 574-540-2048, or by email
at monastery@synesius.com

Extend unemployment benefits: Call your Senators now

As people of faith, we are called to lift up our voices and take action on behalf for those who suffer from injustice.
 
 In this time of economic crisis <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=79JfQinv329Agvvy5bgty8zgg2spZQ2Y> , millions of our family members, friends, neighbors and members of our congregations face unbelievable hardships. Hunger, homelessness, foreclosures, loss of health care--and loss of hope--face many who want to work but can't find jobs. While some say the recession is ending, it will not end for working families, as the U.S. undergoes a jobless recovery <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=48BRa%2Bk1eQBVSWPtFDuIsczgg2spZQ2Y> . Millions have been unemployed for extended periods of time, and unemployment compensation and subsidies to allow unemployed workers to retain health coverage under the COBRA program have been a lifeline between hardship and ruin. 
 
 Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) is engaging in a one-man filibuster <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=7TkStrUzPZMjS9PHEL2kUczgg2spZQ2Y>  to block extension of unemployment insurance and subsidized COBRA benefits. Legislation allowing states to provide extended benefits expired at the beginning of March. As many as 1.2 million workers will run out of unemployment and COBRA benefits this month if an emergency extension is not passed by Congress.
 
 Every senator has the responsibility to make sure that the Unemployment Insurance and COBRA programs get back up and running as quickly as possible.
 
 Call your two senators now. Call the Capitol switchboard (202-224-3121) today and ask them to transfer you to your two senators.
 
Tell them they must take action. We cannot let the unemployed and their families fall through the cracks because of one senator's grandstanding effort in his final year of service. Tell your senators to stop the games and communicate to their party's leadership that they need to extend these programs through the end of the year, and that it needs to happen as quickly as possible. Each week of delay means that over 200,000 more workers will lose their benefits.
 
 Please forward this e-mail to your friends, family and colleagues. Please e-mail <mailto:tsmukler@iwj.org?subject=I%20called%20my%20senators%20to%20ask%20them%20to%20extend%20unemployment%20and%20COBRA>  me to let me know what the response was when you called.                                      
        
 In Peace and Justice,
 
 Ted Smukler
 Public Policy Director
 Interfaith Worker Justice