In July 1942 Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in a house on Prinsengracht Street in Amsterdam. Anne had recently gotten a diary for her thirteenth birthday, and she spent the two years of their seclusion fillings its pages with notes, letters, and stories. In late 1944 the family was betrayed to the Nazis, and the Franks were taken to concentration camps, where all but Otto, the father, died. After the war ended, Otto made his way back to Amsterdam and read Anne's diary for the first time. Despite the desperateness of their surroundings, the discomfort, and the danger, Anne was hopeful. "I still believe that people are really good at heart," she wrote. What makes some people optimistic in the face of seemingly contradictory reality? Jeremiah lived through two sieges of Jerusalem, the second of which would result in the destruction of the city and the temple. As Nebuchadnezzar's troops surrounded the city that they would destroy in less than a year, Jeremiah's cousin came and asked him to redeem a field in Anathoth to which Jeremiah had the rights. Jeremiah agreed to do so. It was a terrible business decision. The land would soon be worthless if the Babylonians decided to appropriate it, and in any case there was a strong likelihood that Jeremiah himself would be killed in the onslaught of the Babylonian army. Why did Jeremiah agree to purchase the field? He did so because, at heart, Jeremiah was a man of hope. It may seem strange that a prophet of doom could also be called a man of hope, but he was both. He preached God's judgment on his own people, because he believed that that was the message that God wanted him to proclaim. However, he also had a profound conviction that God would not abandon his people. He bought the field not because he expected to get use of it. In fact, elsewhere Jeremiah predicts that Judah will be in exile for seventy years. He bought the field to show that in the darkest of hours, hope still existed. Like Anne Frank, Jeremiah never saw the end of the period of darkness in which he lived, but he hoped--he knew--that evil could not prevail forever.
In the 1965 movie The Naked Prey, a group of British hunters insults an African tribe with whom they are negotiating, and the tribe, in retaliation, kills the entire party, with the exception of the guide, who tried to stop his colleagues' foolishness. The tribe strips him almost naked and gives him a short head start before a war party takes off after him. The bulk of the movie is consumed with the chase, and the man (he is never given a name--it's easier to kill someone who doesn't have a name) is in constant danger for his life. The psalmist describes three terrifying threats to his life: pursuing enemies (metaphorically portrayed as fowlers), demons of the night, and full-scale war. Despite his circumstances, however, the psalmist proclaims that he is not afraid, for God is on his side. The psalm ends with a prophetic oracle of salvation in vv. 14-16, in which a cultic prophet speaks for God with a message of personal deliverance. Seven times God says "I" to the one who is persecuted: I will deliver, I will protect, I will answer, I will be with them, I will rescue, I will honor, I will satisfy. The terrors that the psalmist describes are all too real in our modern world. A pursuing enemy might be a stalker or a motorist caught up in road rage. We don't believe in night demons or demons of the desert any more, but there is plenty of random evil to go around: stray bullets from a gang shootout (even more likely now that assault weapons are back on sale in the U.S.), a drunk driver careening across the median, a drug dealer in your child's school. The danger of war is seemingly everpresent, either in its traditional form for soldiers and sailors called to serve on the battlefield or in the form that those without armies unleash on their enemies: terrorism. Our own government wants to keep us in constant fear, warning us that we are currently under an "elevated" threat advisory (Yellow Alert), meaning that there is "significant risk of terrorist attacks." Yes, there is danger all around, perhaps more so than at any time in history, but we don't have to live in fear. The message of Psalm 91 is that we are not alone in the struggle, for God is with us. We can live our lives without paralyzing fear, because we know God has not abandoned us. We have no control over where evil strikes, whether close to home or far away. There is little we can do to stop it, but we can refuse to surrender to fear. As followers of God, we live our lives every day in God, and when it comes time to die, we will die in God as well. Until then, let us live courageous lives in the presence of our faithful God.
Why do politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, spend more than $100 million in pursuit of the office of president of the United States? The job only pays $400,000, which is a lot of money for most of us, but to most people in the race it is actually a decrease in pay. What is the attraction, then? What motivates people to run? One way to tell what a president will stand for is to examine his list of donors. If big oil supports him, expect tax breaks for oil companies and record profits for shareholders. If lawyers support him, expect laws to be changed that favor the lawyers' primary clients, whether corporations or individuals. If large corporations back a candidate, you can bet that those companies expect payback of some sort. "Oh no! That would be illegal!" you might say. Not when the laws are written by the same people who profit from buying and selling politicians. Campaign finance reform is a noble goal, but it is largely a joke, because the federal courts don't know the difference between donating money and free speech, or between the rights of individuals and the rights of corporations. Why don't we ever see a politician run for president on a platform of ensuring that every single person in the country has health care, that everyone has equal access to public education from preschool to university, that military spending is trimmed to levels comparable to those of other industrialized countries so that the excess money can be spent on infrastructure like roads and schools, that "free trade" actually benefit individuals and small businesses in our country and others instead of putting more money in the pockets of multinational corporations? We actually did have a candidate who ran on such a platform--Dennis Kucinich--but of course the big corporations weren't interested in seeing him become president, because it might hurt their bottom line, so they didn't support him. When Paul said, "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil," he wasn't just whistling Dixie. Money can be a great tool for doing good, but too often it just ends up in the pockets of the fabulously wealthy, as well as their off-shore corporations. The implicit goal of every publicly traded company, and most private companies as well, is to make money for the shareholders. Making money is not necessarily a bad thing, but it shouldn't be a company's or and individual's primary goal. When making money become more of a consideration than how we use our money, we have fallen into the trap of greed. As Christians we need to be asking ourselves this question constantly: what does God want me to do with the money I have? Of course we'll spend some on ourselves and on our family, but how much will we reserve for charitable donations, to our church and otherwise? If we have control over budgets at work, how will we use that money? Ordinary citizens have no direct control over how our government allocates money, but we can certainly vote for candidates on the basis of how they propose to spend the huge amounts of money that come into government coffers. Do they promise to bribe you with tax cuts for the rich and/or middle class (Congress just passed such a bill--deficit, what deficit?)? Do they pledge to build up the military even more than its currently bloated size, money that is primarily spent on weapons systems rather than on increasing the shockingly low salaries of many military personnel? Do they seek to soothe your conscience by promising relatively small amounts of cash or credit(!) to fight AIDS, reduce poverty, or provide debt relief to Third World countries (money that very likely won't be spend anyway). If these are the kinds of people seeking your vote, run like a scalded cat! Several years ago Francis Shaeffer wrote a book called How Shall We Then Live? What we need today is a book called How Shall We Then Spend?
In his book, The Literary Function of Possessions in Luke-Acts, Luke Timothy Johnson traces Luke's use of wealth as a literary device in Luke-Acts. For Luke, "possessions are a sign of power" (p. 221). Wealth is a great danger to those who possess it in these books, for they have a tendency to rely on money rather than God. Luke's portrayal of the Rich Young Ruler, for example, is less sympathetic than in the other gospels. In Luke, for example, he is not "Young," so he is mature enough to be responsible for his actions, or his inaction. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is one of the most striking indictments of the corrupting influence of wealth and its consequences in the gospels. The rich man in the story lives a life of comfort, while Lazarus suffers right outside the gates of his house. In the afterlife their roles are reversed, with Lazarus resting in the "bosom of Abraham" and the rich man suffering the torments of hell. Nowhere in the story does it say that the rich man was bad or that the poor man was good, much less anything about justification by faith. The clear implication is that those who are poor and who suffer in this life are destined for a blissful afterlife, while those who are rich and live extravagantly now will suffer torment in the hereafter. But there is more to the story. Although the story doesn't explicitly say that the rich man was bad or that he persecuted the poor, his attitude toward them can be deduced. First, he wore fancy clothes and feasted every day, a clear case of conspicuous consumption. Second, he was aware of the fact that Lazarus lay outside his gates day by day, for he calls specifically for Lazarus by name to bring him water. Had he ever sent water out to Lazarus, much less food? Apparently not. Third, he shows concern for his brothers' fate, implying that he now understands that his former lifestyle led directly to his current condition. The rich man didn't consciously harm Lazarus. In fact, he hardly seemed to notice him at all. That fact is an indictment of almost all of us who live in the affluent West. To some extent we've managed, like the rich man, to keep the poor outside our gates so we won't notice them. We live in neighborhoods where there are no poor people, or if there are, we don't know about it. We drive through the run-down, poor parts of our cities with our doors locked and our windows rolled up. And as for the poor in other countries, well, who really cares about them, anyway? If they were more ambitious, we tell ourselves, they would be able to drag themselves up out of poverty. When Jesus told the story of the rich man and Lazarus, his disciples probably identified with Lazarus, because most of them were poor, too. When we read the story today, we should probably identify with the rich man. Are riches a help or a hindrance to our Christian testimony? How can we use our money to help the poor? There are of course many good non-profit organizations that minister to the poor, and many churches do as well. In addition to giving our money, we can give our time. We can build a Habitat House, or work in a clothes closet, or help out in a homeless shelter, or go on a mission trip to help build a new school in a poor village. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus ends on a note of irony that is doubly ironic today. In response to the rich man's request to send Lazarus to warn his brothers, Abraham reminds the rich man that they have Moses and the prophets to warn them. "'No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.' He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even in someone rises from the dead.'" The irony in the story is that Jesus is the one who rose from the dead, but many of his contemporaries still refused to listen to the testimony of the disciples. The second irony applies in our time, because modern Christians have supposedly accepted Jesus as the risen Lord, yet we still ignore the warnings of Moses and the Old Testament prophets, not to mention the message of Jesus himself. Christians today buy into the culture of consumerism with gusto, so that it is difficult or impossible to tell a Christian from his non-practicing neighbor. God calls us to be different from the crowd around us, and God specifically calls us to care for the poor. When we do that, we will demonstrate that we have been truly transformed by our contact with Christ.