Dr. King's Economic Justice: OUR UNFINISHED WORK

For he will deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help.  He will take pity on the poor and the needy, and save the weak from death (Psalm 72:12-13).

Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith, and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him (James 2:5)?”

You trample on the poor and force him to give you grain . . . .  You oppress the righteous and take bribes, and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts (Amos 5:11-12).

*        *        *

On a Thursday evening, the 10^th of November last year, a 37-year old man, a Christian, and an active member of his church was arrested and charged with bank robbery and the murder of a police officer.  After allegedly robbing the Bank of America in Vallejo, California, he fled the pursuit of a 45-year-old, 19-year veteran of the police department there-also a Christian.  Both men were married, fathers of children.  The 37-year-old suspect was out of work.  He had been convicted of crimes before, but had stayed out of trouble for more than 11 years, and had seemingly turned his life around, becoming a responsible member of the community.

The alleged assailant had been unemployed for more than a year and the family home was about to be foreclosed on.  It is speculated that his financial troubles may have been behind his seeming spiral into violence.

The officer was not only a 19-year veteran patrolman with a spotless record, but he was a pillar of the community.  He was committed in word and deed to improving the quality of life for at-risk urban youth in Vallejo, California.  He volunteered as a basketball coach for the local high school, a community center, and in fact had served as a role model for one of the associate pastors of his alleged slayer’s church.  The community was hit hard, grieving both for the slain officer and the family of the alleged slayer.  It appears that though devout and sincere in his faith and his personal transformation, the alleged assailant was unable to hold it together against the economic strain his family faced.  His church’s general negation of the social crises around them in favor of preparing members for prosperity on earth, and encouraging them in their individual spiritual growth and authority as they await heaven, was unable to stem his penchant for criminal activity and his return to the same when he found the promised prosperity disappearing around him. 

The so-called issues of the Social Gospel are the issues of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The exploitation, abuse and injustice leveled by the rich and powerful against the poor are themes in the burden of the Prophets, the Law of Moses, the compassion of Siddhartha, and several Surahs of the Qur’an. 

The church can spiritualize and ignore the real problems of real human beings all it wants, or like some mainline communions, it can cater to the middle and upper classes and get amnesia about the very people that John Wesley dedicated himself to in England, and Richard Allen in America: The poor, the marginalized, the outcast, and those who were being used as human machines for plantations and the new industrial revolution.  Yet these issues do not go away and will continue to have an adverse effect on our people.  Furthermore God will judge us for this neglect, this apathy, this rush to comfort, acceptability and popularity that we seem so compelled to pursue.

*        *        *

On November 27, 1967, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized a Poor People's Campaign to address issues of economic justice and housing for the poor in the United States, aiming itself at rebuilding America's cities . . . . Martin Luther King Jr. labeled the Poor People's Campaign the "second phase," of the civil rights struggle - setting goals such as gathering activists to lobby Congress for an "Economic Bill of Rights," Dr. King also saw a crying need to confront a Congress that demonstrated its "hostility to the poor " - appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

Under the "economic bill of rights" the Poor People's Campaign asked for the federal government to prioritize helping the poor with an antipoverty package that included housing and a guaranteed annual income for all Americans.  Dr. King pointed out that "the wealthy who own securities have always had a guaranteed income, and the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however miniscule, through welfare benefits."  For this reason he argued that the guaranteed income should be "progressive, set at the median income of society rather than at the bottom," and that it should "automatically increase with inflation."

Dr. King had recently published, Where Do we Go from Here: Chaos of Community (1967). In that book, Dr. King called for the complete economic redistribution of wealth in America.  He wrote further:

          Up to recently, we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home life and suppressed initiative, and fragile family     relationships, which distorted personality development.

Dr. King went on to explain in that same chapter of the book:

          I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to   be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it    directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.  . . .  We are likely to find that the attempt to eliminate the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished....  

          The curse of poverty has no justification in our age . . . . The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

We have now gone full circle.  While King’s birthday celebration approaches the vulgar corporate secularism of Christmas, or of a pre-convention political rump session, where the most opportunistic of people with money and power dominate the platforms proclaiming their allegiance to something nebulously referred to as King’s Dream, most fail to remember his speech of December 24, 1967, in which he stated,

"In 1963...in Washington, D.C....I Tried to talk to the nation about a dream that I had had, and I must confess...that not long after talking about that dream I started seeing it turn into a nightmare.”

In an interview with NPR regarding the Poor Peoples’ Campaign on Dr. King’s birthday, 2008, the Reverend Joseph Lowery stated:

"The nation became conscious of the fact that it has an expanding poor population," says Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King. "It's one thing to have the right to check into the Hiltons and the Marriotts, it's another thing to have the means to check out."

For many of America's poor, there hasn't been much progress in the 40 years since the Poor People's Campaign. In 1968, 25 million people — nearly 13 percent of the population — were living below the poverty level, according to the Census Bureau. In 2006, 36 million people or more than 12 percent of the population were living below the poverty level.

Poverty has been rapidly rising for some time.  The black middle class, in fact the entire American middle class in a recent report from NewsMax, is disappearing all over the country.  Opportunities for higher education are evaporating, even for those who would attend public colleges and universities.  The dropout rate, murder rate and the incarceration rates for black and brown boys and men is outrageous, and growing for black and brown women. 


The ranks of jobless and homeless people are growing exponentially while the gap between rich and poor accelerates. Wealth is more concentrated in the hands of the few. “Pew reported last week that there is a growing rift and resentment between rich and poor in America, due in part to “the underlying shifts in the distribution of wealth in American society.” Pew also reported, “According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data, the proportion of overall wealth — a measure that includes home equity, stocks and bonds, and the value of jewelry, furniture and other possessions — held by the top 10 percent of the population increased from 49 percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2009.”  Democracy itself has vanished or is vanishing as corporate lobbyists exercise almost complete control over the U. S. House of Representative and the Senate. 

*       *        *

So where are the organizations that are addressing King’s economic vision for America?  Where are the progressive economists, business people, educators, clergy and laity who will collectively lift up his vision for economic democracy in America in 2012?  I’m not simply talking about giving speeches like this one, even though more are certainly needed from our too heavenly-spiritually preoccupied churches, mosques, and synagogues. 

One sign of hope has been the Occupy-Move On Movements.  Yet I have heard so much criticism from clergy and other leaders regarding these movements.  I would challenge those critics, put up or shut up.  It is black people and then brown people in America who are disproportionately losing their homes, unable to send qualified children to college, and lacking the funds and resources to keep our children out of the “cradle to the grave prison pipeline.”  The prison industrial complex is growing rapidly.  Many young lawyers are eager to become ADAs so that they can incarcerate more black and brown, men women and children by any means necessary, using this as a stepping-stone to corporate and political careers.  


A sizable number of this army of attorneys are busy working with banks and mortgage companies, helping them to find legal loopholes whereby they can further exploit and suck dollars away from we who are still managing to hold on to our businesses, jobs and homes.

*        *         *        *

Poverty and Faith

Over the past few years, mega-churches have become more popular in black communities, just as they have in white communities. These mega-churches have amassed influence and wealth partly because of their sheer number of parishioners. Some have created satellite churches and broadcast their gospel on television.

On April 3, 1968, in his famous “Promised Land” sermon, Dr. King said, “It's all right to talk about ‘long white robes over yonder,’ in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here.  It's all right to talk about ‘streets flowing with milk and honey,’ but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the New Jerusalem, but one day, God's preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the New Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, and the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.”

This having been said, I would challenge us to adhere to, trust in, reverence, and rely on God.  We need to turn to the pages of the Bible in order to get ourselves back into focus.  We need to recommit ourselves to our first love.  I have no problem in proclaiming that Jesus Christ is both Lord and Deliverer, the savior, the one that God has chosen to bring light and love and truth and hope to the world.  In one of his 1934 readings, the late Prophet Edgar Cayce spoke of the Christ, "Not as only one, but the only one."


We need people who are unapologetically Christian, instead of this wishy-washy “everything is everything” rhetoric that is driving our children elsewhere.  It is God who advocates for us, who has already commissioned Jesus to lead the hosts of heaven in winning every political and economic battle for us, and who is outraged at the state of our planet, but especially at the state of ease, comfort, entertainment, lazy thinking and the absence of thinking and doing and loving in the church. 

One of the hard lessons I have learned is that those who ignore and minimize the sacred texts do so, not because they consider the words archaic or anachronistic or erroneous, but rather because they would rather not be confronted with the expectations God places on us in the scriptures.  It is easy to criticize fundamentalists and evangelicals for having otherworldly views, but I frankly see no strong commitment to economic justice coming from much of the liberal wing of the church.  Our seminaries are in full retreat, having students focus on something nebulous that the majority culture calls “spirituality.”  I grew up in a church where spirituality meant, “Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a flowing stream.” 

In fact people like Jim Wallace of Sojourners and Dr. Herbert Daughtry of the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church, Brooklyn, N. Y., are some of the strongest advocates for economic justice for the poor in America.  Rev. Daughtry is no stranger to us, having worked closely with Rev, Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton and having founded in 1982, the African People's Christian Organization. 

The liberal church of which Dr. King was certainly representative and which nurtured him in his ideological understanding of what God requires, is now marching in lock-step with the rich and powerful under the banner of “neo-liberalism.” The name of its game is accommodation-ism, and it will bend over backwards and bow down to Hell rather than offend its rich classist, heterosexist, racist donors and benefactors and its upper middle class and upper class constituencies.

Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the father of American sociology, was often criticized for being a tad bit elitist and detached.  In 1899, while he was working on his great study, The Philadelphia Negro as a faculty member of Atlanta University, the Wilmington Massacre occurred.  As many as a hundred lives were lost.  Much of the black community in Wilmington, North Carolina known as Brooklyn, had been burned to the ground, and thousands of black residents fled for their lives.

The city had been a bastion of the black middle and upper classes in the south, with a population of 11,324 African Americans and 8,731 whites.   All this was to change overnight.  The Democrats were determined to remove all of the black political appointees that President McKinley had made, in gratitude for the role that African Americans had played in the Spanish-American war.  The Democrats recruited farmers in the outlying areas, whites whose wives were forced to find jobs and work for blacks in the state’s cotton mills in the city. 


Their strategy was to shame whites, just as the Republicans are now doing, into voting for "white economic interests" using racial code language.  With the help of right-wing fringe groups and respectable church liberals like Rebecca Felton of the WCTU, they enflamed the white people of the city and surrounding communities.  Felton quoted her mentor, the vitriolic white supremacist WCTU founder Frances Willard, who had stated publicly that "white women needed to be protected from marauding, inebriated black men," who Williard had also characterized as "fierce beasts." This led to the lynching and mutilation of Samuel Wilkes, which was the catalyst to the massacre.  He was cut, mutilated and parts of his charred remains sold all over the south.  

Du Bois, who was startled by the gruesome murder, had written a sober anti-lynching editorial that he was going to give to Atlanta Constitution’s editor Joel Chandler Harris.  With his walking cane and gloves, Du Bois made his way to the newspaper office, but was stopped short when he passed by a shop on Mitchell Street, where Wilke’s charred knuckles were on display.  It was then that Du Bois realized as he wrote later: “One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved.

I would challenge all who hear and read these words to consider the state of our race, of our nation, and really ask whether or not we can continue to delay or ignore Dr. King’s challenge of economic justice for America.  I would ask us to consider whether or not the time for detachment and sensible responses is over. Perhaps the Occupy Movement is a cue for us to develop a serious program that continues Dr. King’s work for economic justice in America.  I would challenge us to consider those who are starved, excluded, incarcerated, exploited, and have their dreams dashed by those who are interested in quick profits that leave the people hopeless and powerless.  We cannot keep men, women and children out of the criminal justice system with just good intentions.

I know that the Lord secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy (Psalm 140:12).

Woe to him who builds his realm by unjust gain, to set his nest on high, to escape the clutches of ruin!  You have plotted the ruin of many peoples, shaming your own house and forfeiting your life (Habakkuk 2:9).

So I will come near to you for judgment.  I will be quick to testify against . . . those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice, but do not fear me (Malachi 3:5).

What will we do with Dr. King’s call for economic justice in 2012?

Don Guest

Proper Charitable Giving

“The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble.  Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you (Psalm 9:9-10)."

Spike Lee’s classic “Do the Right Thing” presents a picture of the world as too many of us know it.  Those who have power abuse it and live with arrogant disdain for the poor.  Some of us who live with the privilege of power, who claim to be guided by moral and religious principles or our own “sense of right and wrong” too often are paternalistic social “do-gooders” who “want to do good” as long as we don’t have to make any real sacrifices.  We are the most vocal supporters of charity as long as our own comfortable lifestyle with its innate cultural and social boundaries is not put at risk.  We often have more sympathy for our dogs and cats and “free range green farm chickens” than we do for the outcast, feared and despised poor of our world. 

In the 10^th chapter of the Gospel of Mark, the writer conveys this story:  As Jesus started in his way a man ran up to him and fell on his feet before him, “Good Rabbi,” he asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered, “No one is good—except God alone.  You know the commandments, ‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony in court, do not cheat the poor, honor your father and mother.’”  “Teacher,” he declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.”  Jesus looked at him and loved him.  “One thing you lack,” he said, “Go sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come follow me.”  At this the man’s face fell.  He went away sad because he had great wealth (Mark 10:17-22).”

Jesus was not trying to make it impossible for this man to become one of his followers.  On the other hand, Jesus was far more sophisticated in his thinking and understanding about charity than some churches and Christian leaders would have us believe.  He warned the man that God was not looking for “good people” but for people who would allow God’s agenda to transform their own conceptualization of themselves.  He did not want to mislead people about what God required of them.

Jesus wanted us to understand the nature of what God wanted for the world.  It would not be achieved by soliciting donations from the disposable incomes of middle and upper class persons for soup kitchens or the other worthwhile social causes that churches and charitable organizations engaged in.  Something more intense, yet simple was required.

Jesus knew that these acts in and of themselves had nothing to do with making life any better for the recipients, nor for the ones who were the benefactors.  Too often our “goodness” is based on our own social class position, which affords us “the choice” of “helping” the poor.  For Jesus it was not a matter of charity but of lifestyle choice.  To live in accordance with God’s plan meant that self and all that made one feel important and powerful enough to “help” others, must be abandoned.  Only relying on the goodness of God (no strings attached LOVE) and not the goodness of human beings changes the world.  One theologian wrote of God's motive as "total disinterestedness."  

In the January 7^th One-Year Bible reading we read in the Gospel of Matthew: “Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to be seen by them.  If you do you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.  So when you give to the needy do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men.  I tell you the truth; they have received their reward in full.  But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret.  Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret will reward you (Wow!  Seems like we have institutionalized in our faith communities the very thing that Jesus warned us NOT TO DO—advertising, honoring and reporting on those who give for our good work—Matthew 6:1-4).”

The poor are more suspect of the latter than they are of brutal police, overt white supremacists, the “cradle to the grave prison-pipeline of the criminal ‘just-us’ system, and right wing ideologues.  It appears to the poor, marginalized of society that us “do-gooders” do not really “see them” or really ‘regard them” as the same human beings that we are.  They do not sense that we understand them to have the same needs, the same aspirations, the same blood that bleeds when cut, the same bodies that die when they don’t receive adequate health care, the same minds that are wasted without quality education, and the same psyches and souls that are wounded, often beyond repair, by the abject poverty and lack of resources they must contend with in the ghettos (worn out used “flat-lands” housing, playgrounds--when they do exist, schools, stores and infrastructures) they are consigned to live in. 

We never seem to connect the massive profits our businesses or our stocks, IRAs, pensions and capital investments are making with the growing rampant joblessness, homelessness, drop-out rates and incarcerations that so tragically characterize ever-growing segments of the American population. 

It’s kind of like what I wrote about in a previous post regarding Chevron Oil.  Chevron’s giving 3.7 million dollars to social service agencies in Richmond, and then simultaneously seeking to take back $60 million from the taxes they paid to the county—after having already sued and gotten $120 million in taxes back from the county for previous years, is the worst kind of cynical greed and disregard for the well-being of American citizens.  Add this to their hundreds of billions of dollars of profits each year, their charitable giving amounts to a heinous joke—a pittance “in the name of” offering remedy for the social conditions that their refusal to pay a fair share of taxes has helped to create and exacerbate in that same city.  Those who scramble for these dollars miss the larger picture of how their "gratitude" and "competition" feeds the misery of the very people they believe they are helping.

It's like Jewish guards in the Warsaw Ghetto believing that they were helping Jews by carrying out the orders of the Germans to keep order there.  In reality, such social service agencies become the de facto agents of those who would inflict misery and suffering on the poor in favor or more profits.  Those who ignore the Bible’s clear teaching in favor of their own contemporary religious-ethical spin on charity do the same thing.

But in this song from the Hebrew Psalter (9:9-10), it is clear that the poor are not to seek out the assistance of “good human beings” or “progressive human beings.”

Neither are the poor to put their trust in pastors or politicians or corporate leaders.

The poor are to put their trust, to put their hope in, and to rely upon God (no strings attached LOVE). The oppressed are told that the LORD (YHWH) Adonai, or Jehovah--the God of "WHAT WILL BE" is their refuge.  The almighty sovereign Creator is the Fortress, the Strong Shield “in times of trouble,” and the One who ultimately brings a new reality for all.  

You want to help the poor?  Then teach the poor God’s name--after you have learned to call on that name for your own very breath and life and health.  You want to assist the poor?  Teach the poor to trust, to have hope in the One who loves them even as you trust and hope and embrace that same love.  Admit to the poor that too often they suffer because too often we too often fear and despise them.  Teach the poor that we cannot save them or even ourselves, but that God rescues them and will rescue us all who live by faith in God's unconditional love.  God does and will do this not because of what we do or have done, not because we are better or smarter than the right or the left, but because God loves all of us equally and in spite of our sins, our mistakes and our fears. 

Teach the poor that they must not define themselves by the poverty of a sub-culture of desperation, limited choices and the loathsomeness that we transfer off to them from our own fear and false consciousness, and that they also define themselves by.  Confess to the poor that our attitudes and fears have contributed to their suffering and ask the poor for their forgiveness.

God loves all of us, but the Bible is clear that God has a preferential option for the poor (Matthew 6:19-21; Luke 1:46-55).  God’s message is that the poor, like us, are fearfully and wonderfully made, and are the “apple of God’s eye.”  In fact THEY are US-- if we truly understand the concept of God’s new heaven and new earth.  We are all in training for another time, another place, and another world where love, mercy and truth are the order of the day. 

We have an opportunity to live in humility instead arrogance.  It is never too late for us to change our behavior and approach (repentance-metanoia).  God calls us through the Hebrew Bible, The Christian Bible and the Holy Qur'an to encourage the poor and outcast to join with us, be a part of us, have the best seats in our churches, our mosques, and our synagogues, attend our schools with our children, house themselves in our neighborhoods--our "hills," join life with our families, our social clubs, our community councils, work with us and share the fruits of labor in our businesses, our corporations, and have a place in our future, and join with us at decision-making tables as equals in seeking solutions that lessen the suffering of all human beings until Christ returns. 

The poor will no longer be victimized by anyone on the same day that we decide to “let the poor become a part of us.”  Seems like too much, a tall order.  The song of Psalm 9 concludes, “For you Lord have never forsaken those who seek you.”

The Challenge of Spiritual Leadership

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children.  But she had an Egyptian maidservant names Hagar; so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her.” Abram agreed to what Sarai said (Genesis 16:1-2).

In Orlando, Florida, Riva Tims, wife of deceased pastor Zachary Tims, has been fighting to run the church that she and her husband founded in 1996, the New Destiny Christian Center.  But Pastor Paula White was chosen to run the church, leading to a major divide in the church’s ranks.  The church planned to announce their new leader on January 1.  It is alleged that a survey was sent out to church members asking them if they want Paula White to be their new pastor.  The problem was that no other names were offered for consideration.  Riva Tims made a strong statement about her treatment at church this Sunday on her Facebook page accusing Ms. White of being deceptive, a false prophet, and of sexual promiscuity to influence male church members.  

One member posted a comment on Rev. Tims’ Facebook page:

The church did not belong to Zachary Tims, it does not belong to Paula White, it does not belong to the board of directors, it does not belong to Riva Tims, and it does not belong to her children. The last time I checked, the Bible says that Jesus Christ is the head of the church (Colossians 1:18).

Genesis 16:2 ends with the comment, “Abram agreed to what Sarai said.”  I believe that our nation is in crisis because our cultural, financial, political and religious leadership has been in crisis.  In this election year (2012) we will see Presidential candidates, church bishops, and business leadership, all chosen by less than democratic means.  Money, influence, back room deals, family loyalty, bedroom politics, influence peddling, arm twisting, and lots and lots and lots of money and dental bills to show us that gleaming white smiles or the ability of that person to exact the same in other situations, will determine the outcomes of most of these contests.  Many religious traditions have sacred processes or democratic processes or both for choosing their leadership.  What is happening in our faith communities is a sign of the corruption that is occurring in leadership choices in the larger society.

As a young pastor I had friends in many religious traditions.  I remember distinctly visiting the Metropolitan Baptist Church on the West Side of Chicago.  It was an impressive place, every pew filled.  The pastor, the Reverend E. F. Ledbetter was a genteel soft-spoken man whose words carried great weight with the people.  His life was one of consistent self-sacrifice, humility and strong spiritual leadership. 

He was failing in health and not long for this world, so that this particular Sunday afternoon at a special musical, he stated plainly regarding his successor, “We will vote until a majority decision is made.  I will not choose your new pastor for you, nor will the deacons of the church, nor will anyone appoint himself after my death.  In the Baptist tradition, we believe that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God.’” 

For some reason this made a great impression.  It was the clearest statement of public religion that I had ever heard from a pulpit, and yet for a young man raised to believe in the virtues of democracy in choosing leaders for our Republic, it was solid stuff.  This congregational policy was new but refreshing. 

I knew the discontent that often followed when the bishop appointed pastors--even my recent appointment as pastor to a church that had no REAL input and decision in my being there, was difficult.  Years later those members would be just as unhappy when the bishop decided that he wanted me to serve in a different parish.  For the past 40 years my family was often uprooted.  This constant moving had a very negative impact on my children as well as the marital relationships.  So the Reverend Ledbetter’s words were music to my ears.  Of course after his death there followed a vitriolic struggle in which one associate pastor split off with a gaggle of members to form another Baptist congregation, and the choice that “deacon’s board” did make was one that ended in yet another poor choice a few years later. 

In the United Methodist Church where I am a clergy member in full connection, we like Baptists, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Presbyterians, and many others believe that one needs to be called by God and have a clear sense of this call.  It means that you accept divine leadership and you don’t back away from making decisions because you are trying to please one or more members of a congregation, of a board, of a committee, of a council, of the larger community, etc.  Neither do your spouse, offspring, parents, neighbors, best friends, etc. make decisions for you.  It’s about leadership. 

In the Roman Catholic Church the Church Council advises the pastor, but the final decisions rest with him.  In most religious communities, sermons, matters of faith and practice, selection of other church leaders, etc. are decided by that person called to ministry.  In Roman Catholic, Protestant Episcopal, United Methodist and similar churches, boards, clergy committees of ordained clergy and councils examine those who claim to be called to verify whether or not their calling squares with what those particular communions believe.  It is then the bishops who assign or appoint pastors, after consulting with the local parishes.  In the Presbyterian and other Reformed communities, a classis or presbytery also approves candidates for ordination, and then the decision to accept them as pastors is given to a board of lay elders in each local church.  The United Methodists final decision is with the annual conference to which a pastor is a member, on recommendation by the conference’s board of ordained ministry, which until recently was exclusively a board of ordained clergy. 

Yet, none of these processes guarantees that leaders will be effective God-directed leaders, but having a husband decide that his wife will follow him as pastor or a pastor decide that her/his son or daughter will succeed them leads to the kind of neo-nepotistic chaos we are experiencing that is too evident in too many places in our world.  Examples like North Korea, Chicago, Illinois, the previous Bush Administrations readily come to mind. These are examples of family loyalty and cronyism run amuck.

God called Abram to lead.  In Genesis 15:1 he received a vision in which God said to him, “Do not be afraid . . . I am your shield, your very great reward.”   Later in verse 15:5-6 we read:  “He took him outside and said, ‘Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them,’ Then he said to him, ‘so shall your offspring be.’ Abram believed the Lord, and God credited this faith to him as righteousness.”

Abram had proved his call, his leadership by believing what God said.  I cannot speak for leaders of the other sectors of our reality, but in the assembly, the church, the meeting house, the mosque, the synagogue, the temple—what defines called leadership is the ability to put God and what God has said, promised, commanded, and proclaimed FIRST.  It is not family first, spouse first, offspring first, friends and cronies first, big donors first, loud critics first, old friends first, but GOD FIRST. 

In all kinds of faith communities in America today, we need God-First leaders, whether the people choose to believe us or not.  Our call was not given to us by “the people—the board—the committee—the council—the conference—the bishop—the deacons.”  The call of authentic, prophetic God leaders must always come from God.  As the people of God, we must exercise our God given rights to affirm that call.  It can never be delegated to a back room or a representative group, because the buck stops somewhere.

Interestingly enough, after Abram “agreed to what Sarai said,” and Hagar, now with child and feeling superior began to despise her, Sarai complained to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering.”  In a real sense this is true, because he had listened to and acted in accordance with what “Sarai had said,” instead of listening to and patiently waiting in faith for what “God has promised.” God’s promises are clear in the Hebrew Bible for all persons who follow in the “faith-steps” of Abraham.

Each of us as God’s people can and must exercise spiritual leadership in 2012.  We must learn to distinguish between what those we love and care about are encouraging us to do, advising us to think, counseling us to consider, and turn always to what God has promised us.  Everyone who exercises faith is part of a “royal priesthood” that is called to lead in demonstrating and witnessing to the power of God’s compassion in the world.  The promises of God are many for we who seek to walk in the spiritual power of God’s unconditional love.  Whose advice are you following this year?   Are you going to lead, or look for someone to pick a leader for you?

Last Word /First Word: SPEAK UP FOR . . .

“Speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy (Proverbs 31:8-9).” "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)."

Who are those who cannot speak up for themselves? Are not we in danger of becoming paternalistic in obeying this command from God’s Word? Is it not indeed better for people to speak for themselves? More than a century ago, Mr. Booker T. Washington encouraged the young graduates of Tuskegee Institute, which included my grandmother, Esther Louise Driskell:

"I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race."

Only when we consider the social context of the early 1900s, in the midst of a Jim Crow world, where the right to vote, to protest injustice, to protect the men, women and children of our families from economic exploitation, false accusation, lynching, murder and rape became virtually non-existent, can we truly grasp the words of this great man. Mr. Washington was not dismissing these circumstances. In fact in that same speech, he spoke out most forcefully that “to be separate yet equal in the things that every man requires, the Negro must have the resources guaranteed to all Americans to achieve that same dream to which we all aspire.”

Those political parasites in the 21st century who feed off of the quotes of great men and women saints like Dr. King, Mary McCleod Bethune, Dorothy Height, Malcolm X, Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells Barnett practice the worst and most brazen form of genocide. They use the words of “freedom” to justify the continued vicious oppression of those who are marginalized because of class, race and status. They seek to separate these great leaders and their words from the political and social contexts in which they spoke and wrote. They bastardize pure words of encouragement, faith, hope and love to a hopeless discouraged people, to justify and legitimize the continued marginalization of the black-brown poor and “different”.

We should not be surprised. The sacred Word of God has for centuries been so misused in support for avarice, conquest, exploitation, genocide, theft, and torture that gave some their “affluence” and “power” over the many of our world. Booker T. Washington spoke to those African American students in 1909 reminding them that notwithstanding their hard and well-earned degrees, they faced “hard and unusual struggle” that they were “compelled to pass through.”

Washington clearly understood that what Black African Americans faced in 1909 was both cruel and unusual, but given the realities for people of color (African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans. Armenian Americans and at that time all Jews and Italians) in a white Supremacist country, they had little option but to work to develop “strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.”

Parenthetically speaking, the latter part of this quote should dispel the idea in anyone’s mind that Booker T. Washington was a “white man’s ‘Kneegro’,” for his comment is clearly a swipe at a race of people who got free land, free resources, free passage and settlement (its army forcibly removing and murdering the Native American population) and often arrived in America with many advantages compared to those who arrived in chains.

Washington was alluding to these perquisites, which enabled that same race to so ably build its white supremacist Republic.
Booker T. Washington did not argue that success was impossible or possible for those who heard him. He did not have the luxury of such Socratic inquiry, and neither did they. He spoke words that sunny morning in May that required the “leap of faith” from its hearers that those later existentialist theologians like Kierkegaard, Tillich, Bultmann and Barth would proclaim. Yet these great theological minds failed to cite a single example from the words of this great architect of the American Republic or any other person of color. All of the examples of their “new” religious ideology fell within the framework of the white Supremacy that Western Europe and the United States of America has so carefully crafted.

Ironically in 2012 most white and immigrant Americans continue to remain ignorant of these famous men and women, because their complete life stories and contexts remain "un-documented" in American international propaganda, American history texts, and new neo-racist elementary and high school texts in some of our largest states, where they are seeking to remove any positive credible memory of the same. A whole new generation of white Americans is committed to perpetuating the lie that “the white man built America” with no credible initiative, planning, innovation or even assistance from the persistently invisible men and women of color. It is not enough to make people of color and themselves overpay and be overcharged for their own houses, and to deny mortgages to even those of us who can afford to live in their safe lily-white havens. It is not enough to deny us opportunities for business, for education, for the redress of centuries of unpaid labor, of reparation which will give us access to information, credit, education and commerce, but they must take our very words and use them as weapons against us.

So back to my initial questions, “Who are those who cannot speak up for themselves? Are not we in danger of becoming paternalistic in obeying this command from God’s Word? Is it not indeed better for people to speak for themselves?

Of course it is better for people to speak for themselves. So a real challenge that all of us face is “to hear what the people in the margins have to say, before we presume to speak for ‘them’.” I would argue that we must speak up for those who cannot speak as a means of reparation for the sins of our ancestors and ourselves. This includes all of us.

There are children who cannot speak in our communities because they lack the basic family unit through which love and culture and meaning and life are transmitted. There are whole families who cannot speak because our society renders them invisible by virtue of class, race, education, and neighborhood. There are black and brown LGBT people who cannot speak because they have a hard time getting a hearing in communities where “life and death survival” too often continues to be the pressing agenda and any other agenda seems a threat to the same. In addition they remain plagued with the white supremacy of the larger majority LGBT community.

There are the children who cannot speak for themselves because our society does not empower children. Rather our legal system preys on their vulnerability, to initiate them into the criminal justice “cradle to the grave” pipeline at an early age, so that the children of the majority class/race group can exploit their misery to pay off their law school loans.

We must speak for men and women who no matter how creative and skilled and well-educated have trouble finding gainful employment or clients or customers because no one will hire them, obtain them for service or buy from them if the melanin in their skin is too evident.

Surely I am only skimming the surface of those who cannot speak for themselves. Who speaks for the victims of gang violence, of domestic abuse, of the exploitation for entertainment and sex and violence of poor women, children and men? The media does not tell their stories. One reason it does not is because there are prominent well-heeled predators who can afford to buy silence, to travel, to buy the small fists of young black and brown boys for their illegal sport and their bodies for gratification, to obtain the best legal defense necessary if they are not judges and senators and congressmen/women themselves, to show up on college campuses as prominent alumni willing to lure young impoverished women (and men) seeking to better their lives with limited resources.

God challenges us through the ancient Hebrew folk wisdom recorded in Proverbs 31:8, “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute.” But not only must our individual voices be raised, God requires us to “Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy. Through the courts, through legislative assemblies, city councils, tax boards, university senates and boards of regents, injustice is the name of the game for the poor. No one is there to defend them. No one is there to stop the rabid incarceration of black and brown children so that the gears and wheels of the criminal justice system can remain well oiled and operational.

Who will be there to speak for the right to a quality free education (k-grad school), to the hope of a livelihood? Who will make the demand for quality comprehensive health care, even for ALL-“all means all? Who will demand adequate and comfortable housing and nutrition for all of the citizens of our great Republic? Who will fight to change the system by joining with others who are so engaged to make out of America a nation ruled by real justice, love and human fulfillment in 2012?

There are consequences if we choose not to obey this Word of wisdom. To paraphrase Dr. King from above, we in our silence and inaction will have decided that our lives have ended.

Happy Meaningful New Year,
Don Guest