Saturday, May 17, 2014
Pentecost 16 Proper 17 ~ Lectionary Year A ~ Solidarity
Pentecost
16
Proper
17 ~ Lectionary Year A ~ August
31, 2008
Holy
Trinity & St. Anskar
For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but
forfeit their life?
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
What is this life ~ this soul that we must lose ~ in order to find it? What
are the divine things that Peter fails to set his mind upon, so that
the rock of truth turns into another kind of rock – a stumbling block and an
obstacle in the way of life? What is the world, to which Paul advises
us not to be conformed? What are those words that Jeremiah said he ate and they became to him a delight and the joy of his heart? What is the life that we shall lose if we try
to save it?
Among the inexhaustible profundities of this
paradox, there is one to be found in the epistle, where the Apostle continues
to advise the Romans how to live it out.
Last week, we heard his analogy of the body. |We who are many, are
one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. This
week he explains a bit about what that means: no haughtiness, no revenge,
kindness toward immigrants, and so on. To look for life anywhere else than in
this Body is to lose our life. To imagine ourselves to be independent of it is
death. To live as though we were a law unto ourselves is to die. Such a mistake petrifies a soul, like Peter, the Rock was petrified by setting his mind on
earthly things. .
The mind set on earthly things ~ the worldly,
fleshly consciousness, conformed unto the
world, as Paul put it ~ is a sense of self APART from the Body. Apart from
others. And therefore APART from God, because a refusal to obey the second
great commandment: to love your neighbor As YOURSELF, is a refusal also of the
first, which is like it. One who declares himself apart from neighbor declares
himself APART also from God, whom his neighbor resembles.
The opposite of this apartheid is the solidarity of the Body, in Paul’s great analogy. It is not
confined to the Church: this solidarity extends to all humanity and to all
created flesh, to be united in the Mystical Body of Christ at the end of time,
a unity of which the visible Church in the Holy Eucharist is a foretaste and
pledge. We are all members of one another right now, in and out of the visible
Church. The mystical solidarity of the Body of Christ is not to be
distinguished from the social solidarity with one another here and now, which
the Gospel calls the Reign of God. The mystical theology of the Christian
tradition here yokes itself to a political economy that can be called
Christian, and to a principle the late Pope John Paul II called the priority of labor.
Yes, on Labor Day weekend, we contemplate the
mystical Body – the life which we find by losing the imaginary life
of autonomy and apartheid, and the convergence of today’s readings with
our own national celebration invites us to recognize the connection between the
spiritual truth and our own political structures and struggles. Just as I cannot find spiritual fulfillment
alone, just as my own theosis or transfiguration into the divine likeness
happens within the communion of the Church, so the justice we seek in our
social arrangements requires us to renounce the illusion of individuality. We
are individually members of one another in human society right now, and not
only in a sacramental, mystical sense. Social solidarity reflects the
solidarity of creation in general in Christ.
That means that the work we do in the world,
whatever it is, is not for ourselves alone and for our own enrichment or
“getting ahead”. That kind of thinking is petrified. Satanic. It is a thirst
for blood, a hand full of evil plots, a right hand full of bribes. The political economy of “getting ahead” is
nothing other than pure capitalism! (A word that comes from “head” and means
“getting ahead”.) Now there is nothing wrong with accumulating capital, as long
as it is for the purpose of the common good, and the general advancement of the
Body of which we are all members. But the work we do in the world is not for our enrichment as
individuals; it is our contribution to the life of the body, and our way of
loving our neighbor as ourselves.
And that work comes first. It is the source of
capital and it is more important than capital. It has been said that capital is
nothing other than stored labor; a way of saving our labor so that its fruits
may be enjoyed later, rather like energy is stored in a battery. Labor is prior
to capital. More importantly, as the Pope said, our work is our way of obeying
the second commandment. It expresses our love of neighbor. It is our
participation in one another’s lives, that is, in the common life of the body.
Our work expresses our solidarity with the rest of the human community. Everyone’s
work, however humble, is sacred, and of equal importance – just as all the members of a physical body are equal in
importance. In our work, we pour out our vital energy ~ our life ~ and our creativity ~ the image of God ~ for one another, for
the common good. By this contribution, we lose our life as individuals and exchange them for the
incomparably more satisfying life of solidarity and mutual love.
Therefore, it is fundamentally sinful to exploit
or cheat a worker or to force anyone to work against her will. The Law of Moses
says that it is a sin that cries out to heaven for justice. Our work may be our
contribution to the common life, but we are not reducible to our work. Our
dignity as the personal image of God means that our labor must never be reduced
to the level of a commodity, to be bought and sold according to the so-called
“law” of supply and demand. Slavery is the great enemy of human solidarity. If
the apostolic church did not denounce slavery, it was because it thought the
world was coming to an end, and it would be gone soon enough. Later, the
Apostles’ successors gradually prevailed over the empire to mitigate and
finally to abolish slavery. But sinful ingenuity found other ways to cheat
and exploit human labor, and today those with “hands full of bribes” seem to
write the laws of our own country.
Because, in this vale of tears, such sinful
motives are very much with us, for more than a hundred years, the Church has
recognized the righteousness of workers organizing to safeguard the dignity of
their labor. That it might not
be reduced to mere commodity by inhuman structures of avarice. This is not
“class warfare” or the adoption of a materialist ideology. It is a way of
exercising our God-ordained solidarity and incarnating the fact that we ARE all
members of one another. An injury to one is an
injury to all.
Here’s a historical fact: the standard of living
of working people is directly proportionate to union membership. The greater
the percentage of our population that belongs to labor unions, the higher the
general standard of living and the smaller the gap between rich and poor. Those
who want to weaken and destroy the labor movement and increase that gap are the
class warriors. As we have moved in that direction abuses thought long-ago
eradicated have crept back into our society: exploitation that amounts to
slavery in sweat-shops from Mannhattan to the Marshall Islands, and plantations from Florida the Pacific Northwest. And
the victims are not only the especially vulnerable newcomers who can’t speak
English. Native-born suburban white kids have been ensnared in schemes
involving door-to-door sales, in which they are threatened with physical
violence if they try to escape, just like Abramoff’s new slaves in the U.S.
Marshall Islands or the agricultural debt-peons in the South. This has happened
because of the deliberate weakening of labor unions in our country, and because
of federal executives generally unsympathetic to the nation’s labor laws. So
now the same irrational hatred of government regulation that brought us the
Savings and Loan scandals and the crisis in the housing market (which still
threatens to sink the whole world in a depression so vast as to make the ‘30s
seem an era of relative prosperity) this same laissez faire idiocy has succeeded in re-introducing slavery
into the United States.
In the name of freedom, we have embraced
slavery. What will they gain if
they forfeit their life? Is this not an example
of losing our life ~ or our soul ~ by trying to save it? This is the rock we
trip over when we set our minds on earthly things (“getting ahead”) rather
than divine things (solidarity). We have to stop thinking of
ourselves as APART from everybody else and instead allow the Holy Spirit to transform us by the renewing of our minds, so that we really identify ourselves as members of one another. It may seem like death and loss, but if we are
to live at all, in the end like Jeremiah we must EAT the words of God as they are found, so that they may become our
joy and the delight of our hearts:
those who want to save their life will lose it,
and
those who lose their life for my sake will find
it
This is true religion,
which we pray today may increase in us. This is the awful Love of the Name,
which we pray today God may graft into our hearts. This is the good works which
we pray today God may bring forth in us: the life of solidarity in the Body of
Christ, and in the human commonwealth of labor: His Kingdom come on earth as in heaven.
AMEN
MARANATHA
COME,
LORD JESUS
