Blessed are . . . but woe unto!

April 27, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. . . .

“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.” —Luke 6:20–25

My friend Robert and his wife were visiting for a week from the Midwest. We got into long conversations about how different California is from where they live, and how different the churches are. Robert is African-American, and an astute observer of the almost completely white culture around him, including church culture.

It seems to me that most of all, the line between Christian values and social attitudes gets completely blurred out, so that where you live and what the social setting is like will profoundly impact your faith life. In the part of the Midwest where Robert lives, successful middle and upper-middle class people with Republican politics and conformist social attitudes prevail. He has heard a lot of frustration and anger, for example, over the decision that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America made last summer to finally open its doors to partnered gay and lesbian clergy. And he hears a lot of frustration and anger about politics under the Obama administration. “they’ve taken my country away! I want my country back!” he says dramatically, imitating the big tears from his neighbors and even his brother-in-law.

If there is any one thing which is pulling this country apart, it is the underlying sense of privilege and entitlement held by many of its citizens. the people who currently have and hoard privileges will “squeal like a stuck pig” at the slightest suggestion that they must share those privileges with others who do not have them. (If you pool together all of the individual pleas for justice, equality and a decent life from many quarters that are individually dismissed as “special interests” you get a picture of the great big chunk of our nation’s people who don’t have privileges.)

Of course privilege and entitlement are grounded in or mixed up with a belief in the scarcity of all things. I cannot share my wealth with others, for example, because then I won’t have as much. I cannot share equality or justice with others because then I would suffer injustice. Blah, blah, blah.

Racism is a belief that one’s race entitles one to privileges that persons of another race cannot or should not have.

The current rant about illegal immigration is intimately tied into racism, where “Mexicans” (a conflated label for all Latin Americans used by people who are not Latin American) are the “new niggers.”

People with power and privilege, of course, have always maneuvered everything that power and privilege affords them to keep their power and privilege. Legislators who feel privileged and powerful will write the laws and stack the decks to keep their perks. Banks and insurance companies will continue to rig our entire economic system to keep themselves rich. But when the aggregate of “special interests” team up on them – often called “populism”—people of privilege begin to “stoke the fires of indignation”—a phrase form Rachel Maddow that fits a lot of extremist politics going on right now.

In my view, much of the perpetual partisan impasse in Congress and in state legislatures is grounded in this sense that privilege and entitlement are endangered. Politicians who would rather say “no” to everything are implicitly saying “no change” in the status quo, And to defend the status quo is not to say that the world is perfect the way it is, but to say that my position in the world as it is must be defended at all costs.

From a Christian point of view—not one overly affected by the comfortable social values of the middle and upper classes—defending privilege and entitlement is completely contrary to the Gospel of Jesus. His dire warnings were mostly directed at the privileged classes of his ancient society: the priests, scribes and Pharisees that formed the upper social class. Yes, it seems wrong to mix politics and religion (some readers of this will have quit about eight paragraphs ago!), but the fix for that is to not let the politics of privilege influence our faith in God’s justice and care for all people, especially those who have not privileges or entitlement.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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