Against the Trickle-Down Flow--March 9, 2022

Against the Trickle-Down Flow--March 9, 2022

"Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned the righteous one, who does not resist you." [James 5:4-6]

We've got it completely backwards in our culture, I'm afraid.  James takes it for granted that everybody should be able to make a living to feed their families after a day's work, even if it means lower profits for "the company."  And we live in a time and place in which corporate profits are often given higher priority than the lives of actual people.  James says it's a shame--quite literally, a God-damned shame. Even more shameful is how easily we Respectable Religious people turn the God of the Exodus who freed the exploited workers enslaved by Pharaoh into a mascot for unbridled acquisition.  "God wants us to be rich," we so easily fool ourselves into believing, "and clearly anyone who is struggling to get by is being chastised by the Almighty for being lazy, slothful, foolish, or wasteful."  If that isn't conventional wisdom, I'll eat my hat.

It's the same accursed (but still very popular) conventional wisdom that Wendell Berry called out with biting satire in the opening lines of one of his classic poems:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

Berry has got our number, hasn't he?  So many of the voices America calls "successful" would nod their heads in approval to all that advice, not realizing the poet was meaning to be mocking that mindset for its hollowness.  But of course, we aren't the only late-stage empire to live by the code of "More for me at any cost!"  James was calling it out in the days of the Roman Empire here in these verses.  And there's just no way around it:  James once again reminds us that the values of the Reign of God are quite often the very opposite of those propped up by the powers of the day.  And in a culture that glorifies getting as much as you can for yourself, regardless of who you have to step on along the way, it can sound radical to point in the opposite direction and say, "God's vision is that everybody can have enough, and no one needs to get stepped on for that to happen."

In fact, it is downright scandalous to question that "more" isn't always "better."  Our culture takes that as a first principle and a foundational belief.  We treat the creed, "More is better" like it is one of those gospel truths we "hold to be self-evident," to borrow the language of the Declaration of Independence. (And, as a side note, it is worth recalling that before the language of "the pursuit of happiness" was included in those truths, the original wording was, "life, liberty, and property."  That is, the first draft of our founding document was centered on the quest for "stuff.")  

But James has been beating the drum for quite some time here to say that more isn't always better--not for any of us.  More for me often comes at the expense of you having enough for your needs, and beyond that, more for me isn't even always all that good for me.  We can be drowning in stuff and not realize how our possessions get a stranglehold on us, and meanwhile, others around us are struggling just to get by.  James sees that both of those are signs that something is rotten.  When I decide that my quest for "more" is more important than the people who will go with "less" because of that quest, it is a sign that my heart has become hardened with excess like eating too much bacon will harden your arteries.  That's the piece we often miss--my greed not only harms others who will go without, but it harms me as well, by cutting me off from neighbors God has put in my life as gifts of grace, while it slowly clogs my spiritual arteries at the same time.  Part of helping restore my heart and soul, then, is going to mean making sure those neighbors around me have what they need for life, rather than my endless avarice.  Making sure my neighbors can feed their families is also part of how God keeps my soul in good health, too, it turns out.  We are all connected that way--my well-being cannot be separated from yours, and I can't pursue my own good without also seeking yours.  Whether it is popular to say so or not, that's what James reminds us of: I don't have limitless freedom to get all I can for myself at the expense of others.  That's not what God-given freedom is really about, at any rate.  God's vision is for all of us to be free from hunger, free from fear, and free from captivity to our greed, too.  

How can we dare to break out of that bondage to "more for the sake of more" that our culture worships as an idol?  Well, maybe again Wendell Berry's words offer some help that James would agree with.  In the same poem I mentioned just a moment ago--his work, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," Berry offers this sincere counsel:

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Already I can see James smiling, can't you?  The way to break the spell our culture of greed has cast on us is to refuse to accept its terms and to refuse to live by its values.  Do something without seeking profit.  Stop defining success in terms of tax bracket.  Care as much for your neighbors, co-workers, and employees being able to make a living as you do about the bathroom remodel you've got in mind that will wow all your friends.  Give generously, and don't let there be a record that could come back as a bigger tax deduction.  Tell the financial experts you're more interested in how generosity will help grow your soul than in how to grow your net worth.  And remember, as James assumes from the outset, that your well-being is tied up with the well-being of everybody else on God's green earth.  And like the old line goes, if my living simply allows someone else to simply live, that's a trade-off worth making.  

In a culture like ours that tries its damnedest to make greed into a virtue, it's worth a little rebellion to make sure everybody else can eat at the end of the work-day rather than hoarding a bigger pile of "stuff" for me alone. Let's you and I swim against the trickle-down flow.

Lord God free us from captivity to the want for more. Enable us to live simply... so that others may simply live.