BLOG 2/18/15. THE ENIGMA OF SELECTIVE CHRISTIAN ETHICS
In my last blog I was heralding Pope Francis and his ethical focuses (foci?), especially his teachings on the environment. It is no secret that ethics tends to be something of a no-man’s-land in which folk are looking for irrefutable black and white answers, when there often are none. Each generation faces its own ethical challenges. In David Axelrod’s new book on his life, especially his years in the White House, he makes the point of what an impossibly difficult job is that of the president of the United States. His comment is that by the time anything lands on the president’s desk … it is already a crisis. Things that are not crises are handled routinely by his staff. Daily ethical and political crises at home and abroad are before him.
But this is also true of our Christian lives. We don’t live in some religious-spiritual never-never-land, after all. From its very inception the Christian church has lived with its missionary confrontation with the ethics and moral character of the culture, the ’empire’, in which it is incarnated. One can ‘fall off of the wagon’ in several directions, like: one can seek to isolate oneself from the culture totally—but that is not our calling. Or one can get so immersed in seeking to be an accepted presence within a given culture that one becomes too conformed to it.
Then, too, we can focus all of our zeal on one area of ethics and be seemingly indifferent to other areas that are equally demanding.
So where am I going with this?
Well, for one example, there is a lot of heat generated in some Christian circles over the legality of marriage of GLBT couples, and this is worth some thoughtful discussion. At the same time, it is no secret that perhaps a larger issue that faces a good part of the West, including the United States, is the emergence of a plutocracy, of a new golden age, a dominance of wealth, where there is a disparate accumulation of wealth among the top 1% or 2%, and the stagnation of the middle class and the hopelessness of many in the lower classes to even find work.
Is that a Christian concern? It is interesting that while many in the church have focused on God’s judgment of Sodom as the result of its evident sexual promiscuity, they can, at the same time, quite overlook the word of the prophet Ezekiel: “Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom, she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16:49). The prophet does not focus on Sodom’s sexual behavior, … but, rather, on its indifference to the poor and needy. Got it?
And the only entity that Jesus would name as a major competitor to God is: the worship of the false god mammon, i.e., idolatry of riches, avarice, and greed with an accompanying indifference to how it was gained. It was noted in a Texas newspaper those several decades ago, during the Enron scandal, that many of the leading perpetrators of that financial scandal were church members in good standing. That’s not surprising. The Christian church has had a sad history of courting wealthy and influential patrons/members, and never daring to confront them with the huge spiritual danger that their wealth was to themselves, not to mention the consequences on those on whose backs they had made their wealth. It’s not a very popular subject for a pastor (who seeks to be popular) to preach on! Even Jesus’ sobering teaching, saying that whoever is indifferent to the poor, the naked, the sick and imprisoned … is indifferent to Jesus himself, consequently: “Depart from me you wicked …” also gets avoided too often.
It is altogether possible that the Occupy Wall Street movement, of a couple of years ago, had more Christian integrity than the silence of the church in challenging the ethics of wealth.
Like I often say in these blogs, our Christian faith, in its integrity, is a counter-cultural movement, through and through, and embraces that in its basic tenet that requires repentance, i.e., a radical change of mind. It also has compassion on those on the margins. Are we awake?
