One should always pay
one’s debts. We often hear – and teach –
this core principal of our society. An
unpaid debt is a quick way to lose a friend, or make tension with a family
member. It will prevent you from buying
a home and can even impact whether you get hired in today’s job world.
We also like to
project these principals onto our country at large, fretting about the national
debt and what services need to be trimmed, or programs cut, or populations penalized
in order to get our debt under control or preserve earning potential for future
generations. But sometimes our mottos such as these become flawed, or do harm…
In today’s Old
Testament reading, the prophet Ezekiel finds himself face to face with one of
these flawed sayings. "The
parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on
edge." As foreign as this sounds to
us, this was a common saying in Ezekiel’s time.
It referred to the sins of the past generations determining the poor fate
of the current generation. It’s
biblically based in Exodus, when God says he will visit the sins of the father
on the sons for four generations.
However, in Exiled Babylon, the saying had gotten to the point of “Eh.
We’re cursed by our fathers. What does it matter what I do?” God is irked, and through
Ezekiel, admonishes his audience that the Lord never wants to hear it said
again in Israel, and then goes on to argue against the saying for the next 12
verses (the ones we don’t read). This
saying is so common that Ezekiel has to name it and correct it before he can talk
to people, because the flawed logic behind this saying – that God visits the
sins of the parents onto generations - caused people to turn away from their
present responsibilities by blaming the past.
Two years ago I
visited Puerto Rico for the first time with friends. The gorgeous beaches and perfect 80’s
temperature, the quaint and country cities, the solid roads and kind people
made it a heavenly place to visit. It’s
not heaven anymore. Puerto Rico is in
the midst of an epic humanitarian crisis.
There are 3.5 million people, American Citizens and residents of the
Island who are desperate and terrified. According
to the US Army, In four days, the percentage of people in Puerto Rico without
drinking water has risen from 44% to 55%. They have no running water, no cell
phone grid, limited gas, and will be without power for months. A former boss of mine in Chicago named
Marilyn has family there. She wasn’t
sure until yesterday – yesterday, 10 days after the storm – that they had
survived Maria. That was the first her
family was able to make contact. Relief supplies have arrived now in Puerto
Rico, but there are 3000 shipping containers sitting in the dock containing
medicine and drinking water because the roads are impassable and the truck
drivers who would be driving them inland can’t get to work.
The US Virgin Islands are in a worse
situation. Both Irma and Maria hit the
Virgin Islands.
According to the Boston
Globe “the
second storm drowned what the first could not destroy.” The hospitals are
completely destroyed, and they had to lift their curfew because there weren’t
enough hours in the day to bury all the bodies of those who have died of
natural causes since the storm.
Waterfront resorts, which comprised a third of the economy through
tourism, have been reduced to rubble, and on the smallest island, St. John, a
landslide blocks the one road that connects the east and west sides of the
Island.
 |
| The Daily Beast: The Damage Hurricane Irma Left Behind So Far |
The Globe article adds, “So
many public school buildings have been compromised on the three islands that
students cannot go back to class. And the wind has stripped the trees of all
their leaves, leaving the once lush tropical forests looking as if they were
set afire with napalm. The 103,000
people who live in these islands are at the end of a long supply chain of
relief that depends heavily on the ports in neighboring Puerto Rico — now
crippled by Maria and unable to meet the needs of its own people.”
Today
is World Communion Sunday, and it struck me that the descriptions of these
places are closer to what we expect from undeveloped countries in far away
nations, not US territories and US citizens.
But Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands have something else in common
besides their tropic location, total devastation, and being part of the US
Nation; their governments are largely in debt to Wall Street, and that debt has
barred these countries from making the kind of infrastructure improvements they
needed to withstand this kind of storm.
Whether or not you
believe that human activity has impacted climate change, or that we have the
power to reverse it, there is no denying that the agony of our new extreme
weather patterns, and - as has become obvious in the last month, the frequency
of these storms which will compound the suffering – will fall
disproportionately on those least ready to withstand it’s impacts. The wrath of a climate hot under the collar
at our extravagant overconsumption of fossil fuels will be felt by the poorest,
the weakest, and the least protected people on this earth.
 |
| From the Wall Street Journal: Puerto Rico Tallies Up Devastation From Hurricane Maria |
And that brings me back to where I started. Puerto Rico’s $73 billion debt is blamed on mismanagement of public utilities; the Virgin Islands’ $2 billion debt is said to be a direct result of corruption. The President referenced that this debt must be ‘dealt with’ in his tweets on disaster response this week. I’ve been reading a few books that began to scratch the surface of how national debt held by developing nations is like driving a stick-shift with your right hand handcuffed behind you; you have the liberty to steer but it makes it impossible to shift out of first gear and really get moving. The global lenders and financial policies like forced austerity encourage developing countries to continue to sell their raw material assets to outside nations and keep their labor force ‘cheap’, keeping their population poor and powerless. This was an ethical challenge to begin with. But when the impacts of a warming climate – what some people call ‘global weirding’ but I like to call ‘climate chaos’ – fall primarily on these same developing nations, or US territories with excessive debt – that changes the scenario from something that seems unfair to something downright sacrificial. As in, sacrificial of the inhabitants of those countries.
In our gospel today,
Jesus is asked, “By what authority do you do these things?” In the 24 hours before this exchange, Jesus
has ridden into Jerusalem to shouts of Hosanna; he has entered the Temple,
cured the sick, turned over the tables of the moneychangers, and withered a fig
tree with a curse. His power is clear, but the people in charge seem dazed by
his willingness to upend the status quo.
But Jesus can’t stand the inherent unfairness in the money practices in
the temple. The Jewish kingdom was spread
across many nations, and each year at Passover, any Jew in the world who was an
adult male and wished to worship at the Temple would make the trip and make an animal
offering. These animals were for sale in the Temple. Since foreign money with
any foreign image was not permitted in the Jewish ritual, the money changers
would sell "Temple coinage" at a very high rate of exchange and
assess a fee for their services. This practice of buying sacrifices, and changing money with high fees,
was expensive for the wealthy; for the poor it was an incredible burden. Jesus realized it was a predatory practice
that trapped people in debt.
The temple elite
demand to know where Jesus gets his audacity.
Quite simply, Jesus gets it from knowing that God is inherently
fair. Knowing that this system of usury,
and debt, and predatory fees was inherently unfair. Knowing that it was unfair to force people
into debt and prevent them from unable taking control of their own lives.
If we, the global moneychangers,
demand our payment before we allow salvation – the saving grace of modern
infrastructure, improved technology, and responsive resources when disaster
hits - How are we different
from the moneychangers in the temple?
I’m not saying I have
all the answers – I’m certainly not an economics expert – but I’m certain there
are creative economic answers out there.
After all, we have allowed many entities to be bailed out in the last 10
years; when General Motors was failing, or when AIG was ‘too big to fail’; I
mean, even our President has reconciled his debt several times. But as there are many more of these disasters
on the horizon, destined to hit the areas most vulnerable throughout the world,
we can’t ‘fair-market’ our way out of this mess unless we completely extinguish
every ounce of compassion we contain for the people living in these debt-ridden
countries. If we don’t get creative with
their debt, they will continue to be pummeled by extreme weather that we had a
hand in creating. Perhaps, just perhaps, the damage in Puerto Rico
and the Virgin Islands could lead people to seek a more dramatic solution to
Puerto Rico’s debt issues - maybe by restructuring the debt to allow critical
investment in the country’s infrastructure – before the next hurricane
season. There’s got to be a way
that we can help developing nations pay it forward to avert more disasters like
the ones we face from last week.
The good news is that
we can do a little something now, even here at home. Next week, our church will be joining with CROP
walk teams from all over Hastings to raise money for anti hunger initiatives
across the globe. CROP
Hunger Walks are “viewed by many as the granddaddy of charity walks,” since it
was started in 1969. When CROP began in 1947, CROP was an acronym
for the Christian Rural Overseas Program. Its primary mission was to help
Midwest farm families to share their grain with hungry neighbors in post-World
War II Europe and Asia.
These days, it continues
to address hunger and it’s broader causes. Over 2,000 communities
across the U.S. join in more than 1,300 CROP Hunger Walks each year, and
already this year over half a million dollars have been raised in online
donations so far! Of the money we raise for our FCUCC team, 25% will go to support Hastings’ mobile food pantry, and 75% will be
dedicated to Church World Service, both towards hygiene kits and clean-up
buckets for disaster relief, and towards their work around the world – in
places like Guatemala and Haiti, Panama and Indonesia. In these places that are crippled by
international debt, your funds raised through the Crop Walk will help people
grow sustainable and nutritious food, build infrastructure to secure access to
clean drinking water, and create safe housing.
CROP walk is a small
step towards the world being a little more fair. We need to look for more ways to reject the
sour grapes of the past – individual changes and big system changes – to be
sure that the sins of the previous generation do not condemn the future
generations to a much more miserable existence.
For this, in God’s
name, we pray. Amen
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