Apr 18, 2010 
Is there a word from the Lord? This anguished question – spoken aloud or uttered in secret – cries out to present-day Jeremiahs. Retirees bagging groceries, their grandkids interrupting college; unmanageable mortgages and bankruptcies; the unemployed, sharing the news or keeping it secret. Unsettling feelings—anxiety, fear, or sheer panic; discomfort, sadness, or depression; sleepless nights and days of agitation. People need a pastor. Is there a word from the Lord? If only we could return to October 2007, the Dow at 13,000, we muse. When an addict “goes back” it is called relapse, not recovery. Dare I suggest that our desire to go back economically is addiction from which we must recover?
Unsustainable, unjust and unfulfilling
The economy we must leave behind was environmentally unsustainable. Our environment is like a bank account—deposits and withdrawals must be balanced to maintain viability and longevity. Sustainability requires depletion at the rate of global replenishment and waste production at earth’s capacity to absorb it. Global deforestation, rapid loss of arable land, “dead zones” clogging the mouths of rivers or floating toxic islands in the world’s oceans, massive depletion of the large fish population. Unfettered globalization, unbridled growth accelerates momentum toward global environmental collapse. It was socially unjust. The quarter century after World War II a “rising tide did lift all boats.” Wealth generation rose steadily and equitably. Dramatically in the ’80s, precipitously in the ’90s, the gap between the rich and the non-rich dramatically widened. And it was spiritually and psychologically unfulfilling, spawning the highest rate of mental illness in the world, 700,000 treated daily for alcoholism, 75 percent of physician appointments for stress-related conditions. Loneliness and isolation are epidemic, what researchers term “symptoms of malaise,” with suicide rates steadily increasing. Drug wars are fought abroad, with U.S. drug consumption the highest per capita on the planet.
Toward Biblically Based Economics
The biblical tradition offers foundational themes and core elements for a more environmentally sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling economics. Let me offer eight.
1. Creation Economics—Bounty and Abundance
In the creation story’s repeated phrase – and God saw that it was good – “good” is an exuberant, scintillating, pulsating word better translated “bountiful, overflowing, lavish.” Our planet can produce food enough to feed seven times its population, every nation potentially food self-sufficient. Worldwide hunger is thoroughly unnecessary, a travesty and embarrassment. The earth can produce abundance for all, so scarcity is a contrived, not an intrinsic, issue.
2. Manna Economics—Enough
In Egypt the Hebrews knew only imperial economics, wealth concentrated in the hands of an elite minority, an economics of accumulation resting on the backs of an enslaved people. The “two weeks walk that took forty years” and buried and birthed an entire generation, trained a people for an ethic of sufficiency. Manna, nourishing and tasty, plentiful but unable to be hoarded, demonstrated that enough is plenty.
3. Promised Land Economics—Fair Distribution
The Book of Numbers offers stories of intrigue and frustration, preparing a people for freedom. Finally glimpsing that “land flowing with milk and honey,” the land is assigned: each tribe’s allotment based on population, that land divided among tribal families equitably.
4. Sabbath and Jubilee Economics—Redistributio
Inequality, over time, becomes inevitable – luck, differing degrees of healthiness and heartiness, the vagaries of weather – a second generation, then a third inheriting a legacy of gain or loss. Yahweh proposed correctives to re-level the playing field – yes “strategies of redistribution.” The Sabbath and Jubilee years with their sweeping redistribution agendas.
5. Nazareth Economics—Jubilee Reaffirmed
Jesus sermon at Nazareth appears to renew the Jubilee year, sounding of a core theme of Jesus’ mission and ministry, a theme echoing resoundingly in Luke’s gospel – the political, economic and social thrust of Luke’s Beatitudes; the “evidence” offered to John the Baptist’s query; Luke’s fragment of the Lord’s Prayer; and the twin feast stories, the best seats reserved for the poor and disabled.
6. Table-Turning Economics – Status Quo Upended
Jesus mini-rampage in the Temple, over-turning the tables of merchants and tax collectors, seems not so much to protect worship space as to symbolically “overturn” an unjust economy featuring collusion of a Roman, Jewish and ecclesiastical cabal. (In the prophetic tradition: challenging unjust business persons and an unjust economic system).
7. Barnabas Economics—Radical Commonalit
The evidence is unassailable and unambiguous: that the radical economic sharing advocated and practiced by Jesus became normative in the early church. Resources were held in common, even capital reserves liquidated. No one was in need. This sharing was practiced with exuberance, communal deepening and shared joy.
8. Corinthian Economics—Justice, not Charity
2 Corinthians 8 and 9 profiles Paul’s theology of giving, justice not charity, a call to a “fair balance” between one person’s abundance and another’s need, “the one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little” –the “abundance of the rich” met by the “abundance of the poor.”
AN URGENT, UNAVOIDABLE, ESSENTIAL FINAL WORD
These words are a challenge to pastors and everyday Christians to renew the message and movement of the prophets. But who wants to go there?! Amos and Micah spoke their prophetic truth and scurried out of town. They intermittently threw Jeremiah into the nearest cistern. Only the power of Jesus’ person saved him from summary execution after his Nazareth sermon. Speaking truth to power is risky business. Such prophets are grounded in a spiritual practice, walk the talk of a new economics, wean from consumerism and materialism, re-visit their family expense budget as a moral document. A daunting, daring, humble calling!
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