Why God
Hates Inequality
by
Pastor Paul J. Bern
To view
this on my web site, click
here :-)
In a
continuation of my ongoing efforts to bring authentic Christianity
into the 21st
century, which includes a personal relationship with Jesus Christ
combined with an opposition to injustice and inequality, I wish to
bring to your attention a newspaper headline posted a couple of
months ago on TheRoot.com by Monique
Judge, an on-line acquaintance of mine. The headline reads,
“#Flint:
An Update and a Reminder That It Has Been 1,196 Days Since the Mich.
City Had Clean Drinking Water”.
Some selected highlights are as follows:
“....Many
government
officials have been charged with crimes in the subsequent
fallout, but the city is still without
a permanent solution that provides an ongoing source of clean
water for the people who live there. When
the parties were unable to come to an agreement in June, the
Michigan
Department of Environmental Quality filed a lawsuit against the city
after the City Council refused to approve a long-term water contract
with the Great Lakes Water Authority, out of Detroit. The suit
alleges that the city is endangering public health....“There are
some helpful things happening in the meantime. Mayor Karen Weaver’s
office told
the Daily Progress that since March 2016, about 2,700 homes have
had old water lines replaced through the FAST Start Initiative, a
program with a goal of replacing nearly 20,000 lead-tainted water
lines in the city by the year 2020....According
to the Minnesota Star Tribune, Michigan State University, which
received a four-year, $14.4 million grant from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, announced Tuesday that it will be
using the first installment of that grant to establish a registry of
Flint residents who have been exposed to lead since the crisis began
in 2014. It will use the $3.2 million to connect people to programs
that can help minimize the health problems associated with lead
exposure, which include effects on brain development in children. The
Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that it will
forgive $20.7 million in water debt that the city of Flint incurred
through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund....Flint has come a
long way, but there is still much more work that needs to be done.
With help and support like this from federal, state as well as local
entities, Flint will indeed bounce back. Too bad that help hasn’t
come in the form of potable water dripping from the faucets.”
Formerly
middle class people, plus a whole lot of poor folks including people
of color, are having their most basic rights taken away by a runaway
government and their out-of-control police departments. Access to
running water is a fundamental human right. Period. End of story. To
forcibly remove – by turning off or forcibly cutting off –
anyone's access to running water is a crime as far as I am concerned.
The Bible says in the Book of Proverbs chapter 29, verse 7, “The
righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no
such concern”.
That's
God's take on poverty in a nutshell. “The poor you will always
have”, Jesus said not long before His crucifixion, “but you will
not always have me”. The poor are humankind's responsibility,
starting with the churches and its volunteers. Shelter falls into the
same category as water – it too is a basic human right. Even the
earliest humans from 100,000+ years ago slept in caves, long before
the invention of written language, and before the discovery of fire
and the wheel. Moreover, I wrote in my 2011 book, “The Middle and
Working Class Manifesto”, which
is still available in paperback from this website
(or as an e-book on Kindle from here),
that people everywhere have “The
right to affordable housing and the fundamental right to shelter
regardless of economic status. We have a responsibility as a
civilized society to end homelessness.”
Here
in the city of Atlanta where I live, there are lots of boarded up and
abandoned houses (there's plenty out in the suburbs, too, but most of
those aren't on the bus line). There are also a lot of homeless
people, mainly because Georgia is one of those states whose minimum
wage is still stuck at a paltry $7.25 an hour. Any way you slice and
dice it, a single person who makes minimum wage and works 40 hours
per week can't afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in
Atlanta, even though the most basic 1-bedroom rents for 'only' about
$450-500.00 monthly. So there are a slowly growing number of
squatters who are living in these abandoned houses, nearly all
without the benefit of water or electric hook-up. Others live in
their vehicles, if they're lucky enough to still have one. When the
police catch them, and they do so routinely, they are taken directly
to jail. OK, now let's review this. The cops catch some luckless
squatter who is camped out in a house that nobody wants. Since that
person is considered to be a trespasser under Georgia law, and since
the majority of the squatters are also usually black, they are taken
immediately to a city or county jail where it will cost the taxpayers
upwards of $60.00 a day to detain them.
So,
evidently there are some who think it's better to spend $60.00 a day
to house otherwise harmless petty criminals than it is to let them
sleep in abandoned structures at night where they are bothering no
one. No one seems to care about the fact that incarcerating these
people is an unnecessary burden on the taxpayers. I understand that
they're trespassing on someone's property, but if that is something
that must be enforced then why is the structure abandoned and in
disrepair? The answer, brothers and sisters, is greed. The property
owners, many of whom live out of state or overseas – and who want
nothing to do with these properties because they owe back property
taxes on them – will not hesitate to press charges against some
poor homeless man, or a homeless single parent with small children,
for sleeping on a front porch on a rainy night. They can't be there
themselves, so they make donations to the local Fraternal Order of
Police, or “lobby” the local Congressional representative, and
the trespassing laws are rigidly enforced as a result.
The
Bible has plenty to say about this. For example, in Exodus chapter
23, verses 6-9 it says, “Do not deny justice to your poor people
in their lawsuits. Have nothing to do with a false charge and do not
put an innocent or honest person to death, for I will not acquit the
guilty. Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds those who see and
twists the words of the righteous. Do not oppress an alien; you
yourselves know what it is like to be aliens, because you were aliens
in Egypt.” In Psalm 9 verse 8
it reads: “He will judge the world in righteousness; he
will govern the people with justice.”
Psalm 106 verse 3 says, “Blessed are they who maintain
justice, who constantly do what is right.”
There are lots and lots of examples like these that make abundantly
clear that God stands for justice, fairness and equality, such as
Zechariah chapter 7 verses 8-10, and I quote: “And the
word of the Lord came again to Zechariah; 'This is what the Lord
Almighty says: 'Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to
one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or
the poor. In your hearts, do not think evil of each other.'”
Does
America deny justice to poor people? Given the fact that many
nonviolent offenders who get caught up in the “criminal justice”
system wind up languishing in jail for months or even years waiting
for a court date because they can't post their bail bonds, I would
say absolutely America denies justice to poor people. “Do not
accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds those who see and twists the words
of the righteous.” For those
who didn't realize this, these are the very words of God as dictated
to Moses during the ancient Israelite's 40 years in the desert. Today
in our government at the state and federal levels, we have exactly
the opposite. Only today, we give them the innocuous-sounding name
“lobbyists”, which excuses nothing! It's all still a bunch of
bribery! “Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know
what it is like to be aliens....”
All Americans are descended from first-generation immigrants at some
point in their past, however distant that may be. You can already see
where I'm going with this, and I've brought it up before – the
extremely harsh treatment of undocumented foreign nationals, the
majority of whom are people of color, by the majority of American
citizens. It's all race-based and everyone knows it deep down in
their hearts. It's time to call a spade what it is – racial
prejudice – and get it over with. There I just wrote it, or said it
if you're watching this on You Tube, for all to see and hear. It's
way past time for America to confront its issues with racial
prejudice and get over all this nasty racist stuff. There will be no
racists in heaven, all you Christians with your stinking Klan robes!
You cannot love God while despising his creations! So forget about
it!
“This
is what the Lord Almighty says: 'Administer true justice; show mercy
and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the
fatherless, the alien or the poor.”
As before, this is exactly what the USA, an allegedly “Christian
nation”, is doing as I write this. Does the US show “mercy and
compassion”? On the contrary, we have the largest percentage of
people in jails and prisons-for-profit of any nation in the world.
America is first in incarceration, but when it come to education
America truly sucks, and people are just getting things off the
ground with ways to change that. But until this occurs, it is
time for the US middle and working classes to put our collective feet
down and say ”no more”. Let there be no mistake, America is ripe
for mass civil disobedience, even for outright revolution. Moreover,
as I just proved, this is all based on the Bible, not some ideology.
The conditions and circumstances in which the middle and working
classes find themselves has become truly intolerable!
Personally,
I am a very patient and thoughtful man. I work hard each day to be
slow to speak and quick to listen because I know from experience that
there is much wisdom to be derived from living my life this way. But
by the same token, I am a Christian man and Web evangelist who stands
against social injustice and economic inequality, and whose patience
is at its end. Just as surely as Jesus preached against the political
and religious establishment of His day, in like manner I will do the
same in the present day in order to emulate the man I regard as my
personal Lord and Savior. So, if you truly care about the
deteriorating state of our nation, if you are really concerned about
the issues that we are faced with collectively as a people, and if
you want to make a stand against social and economic injustice –
and since it's in all our best interests to do so – you owe it to
yourself to stand up in the face of power and say, “That's it!
You're done!!” You know why? Because if Jesus Christ were to return
this very day, that's what He'd say. And the ones who are having the
homeless thrown in jail for trespassing on their dilapidated
properties would be the first ones Christ would send straight to
hell.
