Hattie the Foodie

A friend invited me for lunch today at a hip restaurant in Dallas' bustling, newly-chic Bishop Arts District.

I had my choice between Hattie's and a gourmet brick oven pizza place. I picked Hattie's.

Not because I'd ever been there before, because I hadn't. Or even because I knew what kind of food they served, because I didn't. I just liked the name.

My Aunt Hattie

You see, one of my mom's aunts in Maine was named Hattie, and what a character she was! Although I don't talk about Maine nearly as much as I do New York City, it's not because I don't have fond memories of people and places in the Pine Tree State. And Hattie was one of those people.

Aunt Hattie was married to my mom's Uncle Arthur, who was one of my grandmother's brothers. So, strictly speaking, she would have been my great-aunt, athough we never got that complicated about it.

Aunt Hattie and Uncle - even though she had several uncles, my mom always referred to Uncle Arthur simply as "Uncle" - were dairy farmers who also had a large vegetable garden. During the summers, back in the good old unregulated days, Uncle would dig up or pick fresh produce and bring it out to simple wooden tables set up in the front yard, where Aunt Hattie would sell it to customers driving by.

If they ran out of something and Uncle was in the fields with the cows, Aunt Hattie would hurry through the barn to the garden out back, pick whatever the customer wanted, and rush back to the front of the house with the fresh-from-the-earth veggies. Carrots, peas, string beans, potatoes, corn, squash. You couldn't get 'em any fresher if you'd gone with Hattie and picked 'em yourself. And that kind of honest-to-goodness freshness was what their neighbors and three months' worth of summer people wanted.

For Aunt Hattie and Uncle's year-round neighbors, back when salt-of-the-earth simplicity defined New England, this was just how you got your vegetables in Maine in the summer. Their village didn't have a grocery store. Most of them labored all day at their own dairy farms, in the woods, on the docks, or out on fishing and lobster boats. Just because they all lived in rural Maine didn't mean they all had time to tend their own gardens.

For the summer people, however, Aunt Hattie and Uncle's stand provided a kitchy, classic blast from the past. Something uniquely country. Virtually all of the summer people came from big cities and growing suburbs outside of Maine, so having a simple roadside stand run by a quiet farmer and his no-nonsense wife was a quaint anomaly. Of course, having fresh corn on the cob every night with one's catch of the day couldn't be beat, either.

Back in the Day

Not only was Uncle quiet, I can barely remember ever hearing him talk. He would smile and wink, and he liked showing my brother and me his cows whenever we visited my grandparents, but like a lot of Maine men, talking was just something guys did when there wasn't anything else to do. And in rural Maine, at least back then, there was always work to be done.

Aunt Hattie, on the other hand, had a gift for gab, along with a gravely, high-pitched voice. Both she and Uncle had weathered skin on their hands and faces, etched by the intense Maine weather and the constant manual labor they both apparently enjoyed. Aunt Hattie would serve customers at the front of the house, her wrinkled hands in constant motion, fingering the collar of her starched blouse, pressing creases out of her apron, washing carrots, shelling peas... and if she thought Uncle was within earshot, she'd call out for him into the clear Maine air with a shrill "Ah-tha! Ah-tha?" (Mainers don't pronounce the letter "R.")

Usually, only silence would greet Aunt Hattie's calls. At least in my memory, Uncle had an uncanny knack of disappearing to the back fields, usually without even a tractor. Or he'd be high up in the barn, further away from the garden than Aunt Hattie in the front yard. But with only a quick apology to the customer, Aunt Hattie would dash off, through the barn, to the back garden, then back to the stand.

That's simply how summers were spent at Aunt Hattie's.

Don't Have Time to Waste

Years later, after Uncle had passed away, and Aunt Hattie was alone in their rambling, quintessential New England farmhouse, my family visited her one summer afternoon.

Aunt Hattie still had children living nearby with their families, who checked on her regularly, but she was too independent to move in with any of them. Instead, she'd closed off the upstairs of her old home and set up a cozy bedroom for herself in the unused stairway hall. With no stairs to climb, and saving money by heating only half the house, why leave?

We pulled into the driveway, and parked near where they used to set up their vegetable stand, which by now had become a distant memory, as had the garden, and the cows.

Already parked in the grassy driveway was a silver car with Massachusetts license plates. Dad suggested that maybe now wasn't a good time, but Mom figured since the car wasn't from Maine, it wasn't anybody important, like Aunt Hattie's children. And sure enough, she was right.

We entered through the summer kitchen, an airy room between the barn and the main house with lots of windows (but no insulation, hence the room's name). Through the screen door between the summer kitchen and the real kitchen, we could see Aunt Hattie, seated, talking with a well-dressed woman who was obviously "from away."

When she saw us, Aunt Hattie burst into a smile, her mouth spreading generously across her broad, wrinkled face. She got up and invited us in with gusto.

Mom and the woman "from away" got into a conversation almost immediately, while Aunt Hattie escorted my father and me into her dining room. Dad leaned over to her and whispered, "who is she?"

"Oh, a former customer," Aunt Hattie's smile disappeared, but she didn't drop her voice like Dad had. At full volume, Aunt Hattie complained: "She's driving me crazy!"

"Shhh!" Dad quickly tried to hush Aunt Hattie, surprised at her apparent lack of tact. "She can hear you."

"Oh, I don't kaya," Aunt Hattie assured Dad, dropping her "R" like a true Mainer. "She's boring me to death!"

Different Hatties

Just as native New Yorkers have a unique quality about their character, so do native Mainers. I guess for people born and raised in one of the bleakest climates and economies in the United States, Mainers adopt stoicism and tenacity as basic survival skills.

Obviously, "Hattie" isn't strictly a New England name. For the restaurant here in Dallas' rapidly-gentrifying Bishop Arts District, "Hattie's" is meant to conjure images of a southern chef. With, as their website pretentiously describes, a "low-country" influence, whatever that means.

Not that it wasn't delicious food. A generous slab of deep-fried yet lightly crusted chicken with zesty Dijon mustard on some Hawaiian bread, with freshly-made onion rings.

Definitely not anything that would have come out of my Aunt Hattie's kitchen up in Maine.

Supposedly, "Hattie" is short for "Harriet" or "Henrietta," but I can't imagine my mother's aunt being called anything but "Hattie."

I don't know why, but I can imagine somebody named "Henrietta" putting a chicken sandwich in Hawaiian bread and still calling it Southern cooking!
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God is NOT Reckless

Define the word "reckless."

This is Merriam - Webster's definition:

"Marked by lack of proper caution: careless of consequences; irresponsible."

Doesn't sound like a particularly admirable quality, does it? Yet in the past several years, the term has taken on a firestorm of popularity in some Christian circles to define an attribute of God.

While I suspect Wild at Heart author John Eldredge may be at least partly culpable for this unfortunate trend, it seems to have really taken off since Redeemer Presbyterian's Tim Keller's book, The Prodigal God, advances a variation of the phrase. In addition, Keller once tweeted, "God's reckless grace is our greatest hope" to his legion of fans.

Considering his dynamic ministry in New York City and his proven track record in reformed evangelical apologetics, I would be inclined to give Keller a pass on this issue, if not for its burgeoning popularity. I've heard there is a contemporary Christian band out there, a contemporary Christian DVD, and other pop-culture twists to Christianity that have jumped on the "reckless" bandwagon, turning it into a hot, hip byword for edgy evangelicalism.

A short post currently on Christianity Today's website spells is out a bit more, claiming that God is reckless in His love for us. Or at least, so says Nathan Foster, son of Christian author Richard Foster, who wrote Celebration of Discipline (1978).

But is God really reckless? Is calling God reckless and prodigal being clever while sacrificing clarity? Does portraying a risk-taking, rebel-happy god of sloppy proportions - which is the imagery "reckless" conjures up - a wise thing to do? God is many things, but a caricature of irresponsibility and waste?

A Word Aptly Spoken?

Don't say I'm splitting grammatical hairs or playing the vocabulary purist on this one. I realize it's fun and cheeky to strip evocative words of their conventional meanings and contrive new contexts for them. Politicians have been doing it for years, as have used car salesmen. However, just because the trend has finally hit a sort of mainstream with the advent of information technology, where rules get re-written constantly, doesn't mean the Gospel needs words re-contextualized to stay relevant.

Granted, when enough people in a culture use a word the wrong way, the wrong way ends up becoming the right context for that word. Take the term "gay," for instance. Thirty years ago, if you said Christ was gay at the wedding of Cana, everybody would have known you meant he was happy and having a good time. Today, if you said Christ was gay, everybody would assume you were saying Christ was a homosexual.

Is that what people who want to think their god is reckless are trying to do? Distort our language?

Because really, when you start investigating what these people intend to say by claiming God is reckless, you soon realize none of them have come up with new understandings of the Trinity. We already know God's love is lavish. We already know it's free, oftentimes contrary to what we would expect, limitless, and will not be thwarted. Do we need a new way to express eternal truths? If so, is this the best way?

Of What Prodigal Means

Of course, Keller has seized upon a word many of us use improperly anyway. The church fathers who compiled the Canon used the word "prodigal" in its traditional sense, with its original meaning. Which, as Keller explains below, isn't the same as what many of us have assumed it to be.

In his preface to Prodigal God, Keller explains his title this way:

“The word ‘prodigal’ does not mean ‘wayward’ but according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, ‘reckless spendthrift’. It means to spend until you have nothing left. This term is therefore as appropriate for describing the father in the story as the younger son. The father’s welcome to the repentant son was literally reckless, because he refused to ‘reckon’ or count his sin against him or demand repayment. This response offended the elder son and most likely the local community."

So for Keller, it seems plausible to jump from "reckless" to "prodigal," and then use the two words interchangeably when describing God.

But what's the flaw in this assumption? Which word most defined the son who took his inheritance early? It's not the "reckless" part of the definition, but "spendthrift," as in "wasteful expenditure" (which is the first listing in Merriam-Webster for the word "prodigal.") Just being reckless could have meant the Prodigal Son was irresponsible in any number of ways, but it was his unwise use of money that led him to eat pigs' slop.

We can't necessarily take the definition for a word or phrase and then use that definition to describe something else entirely. It's linguistic hubris predicated on the assumption taught by our culture that such correlations should be transferable.

Christ Wasn't Wasted

But they doesn't necessarily work out that way. Particularly when we're describing our Heavenly Father. Did God waste His resources to save us? Christ, His pure Son, was poured out as a holy sacrifice for our sins, but was that a reckless plan on God's part? Particularly since both of them knew Christ's death and burial were not going to permanently separate them from each other, or from the Elect?

Even if you don't believe in predestination, can you see how your salvation, as something you could never have earned, has been provided to you out of pure love? Even if Christ died for just one soul, would His death have been in vain? Would the defeat of sin, Hell, and Satan have been a reckless demonstration of God's sovereignty? How much of a box are we putting God in by ascribing such a contrivance as recklessness?

Who - and What - God Is

God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-present, which means He will save whom He will save, and He'll do whatever He needs to do to save His people. But that does not mean God is reckless.
Going back to our definition of the word, consider the fact that God does not ignore caution. He's God - who or what can caution Him about anything? What danger could He ever face? What problem might He encounter that He wouldn't be able to anticipate and overcome?

God is not careless of consequences. All things - ALL things - work TOGETHER for good for those who love God and are called according to His purposes. God knows everything that has happened, is happening now, and will take place tomorrow and 23 million years from now. Everything He does is perfect - there are no negative "consequences" because everything that takes place ultimately points to His glory.

God is not irresponsible. Good grief, He MADE everything! He knows how everything works! Everything - from how blood circulates in our bodies to number of hair on your head (obviously, He's got a lot less my hair to keep track of) to the number of Islamic militants who are training as suicide bombers at this very moment. God can't not be responsible - everything is His for Him to do with as He pleases. He's it. The top. You can' get more trustworthy, reliable, or secure than God.

Can I have a witness here?

So let's stop with the borderline heresy of ascribing recklessness to God. I appreciate the point Keller tries to make about God's lavish love. But even the Prodigal Son's father was motivated by genuine love that was untainted by recklessness, as seen by the way he reasoned with the loyal son and understood his bitterness. Just as their father had the situation well in hand, even moreso does our Heavenly Father.

How thankful we should be that our God is not reckless!
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Lambs Make Bad Shepherds

Note: Today's essay may simply seem like another in a series of Christian-bashing missives, but to be fair, yesterday's critique of Chuck Colson's editorial was to support his goal by endorsing a better battle plan. Today's essay is, unfortunately, your run-of-the-mill televangelist bashing, for which, I must admit, it's hard for me to muster any apologies...


Sad to say, but it's hardly a scandal anymore when a flashy televangelist gets caught with his pants down. Instead of reacting to the news in disbelief, we ask "what took so long?"

Well, at least I do, but then, I'm more cynical than most. So when word got out that Marcus Lamb, founder of the Daystar religious broadcasting network, had an affair several years ago and has tried to keep it quiet all this time, I think I rolled over in my bed and slapped the snooze button.

District Attorney Says No Shake-Down Took Place

Indeed, the way this story has been treated in the press, the "news" isn't that he had an affair, but how he kept it hidden, how he got the woman to move out of state, and why he and his wife never bothered to tell their television audience. This ambivalence about Lamb's violation of his marriage covenant speaks more to the sad state of televangelism in the United States than anything else.

Lamb and his wife, Joni, have rationalized away their cover-up of the affair by saying it was a private family matter they wanted to resolve without public scrutiny. Well, I hope they've gotten everything resolved by now, because lawyers have begun crawling all over things.

Last week, the Lambs went on their daytime show to announce his past affair, claiming three people were extorting them for millions in hush money. As it turns out, the Lambs, apparently true to their sensationalistic Pentecostal leanings, were making more of the "threats" than was true.

A lawyer for at least one former employee did notify the Lambs that his client was suing them over the trauma she had endured for keeping his affair secret. And yes, she's suing the Lambs for millions of dollars. But he claims to have in no way threatened to go to the media with the story if they didn't pay up. It was a court case, after all, not a back-room shake-down. Instead, the Lambs panicked and, realizing they'd made a big mistake by not coming clean with their viewers years ago, decided to try and deflect some of the attention off of themselves and onto their former employees.

How's that for a slimeball husband who's had an affair: blame your employees for having to tell the truth!

They're Both Trying to Spin Their Way Out of It

Joni Lamb hasn't exactly been a saint through all of this either. While she can hardly be blamed for her husband's affair, she apparently learned of it from the employee whose lawyer informed Daystar of the lawsuit. Although initially thankful to the employee, by outing her as an extortionist, Joni is hardly taking the high road in this situation. In fact, by her attitude and the way she's phrased her perspective on her husband's indiscretion, she seems more devoted to preserving their cash cow of a television empire.

Which is what this all comes down to, doesn't it?

If their TV ministry truly engaged with their virtual flock, wouldn't Marcus have felt enough remorse to confess to them what he'd done against his wife and God? Why didn't other executives at Daystar hold him accountable and insist on a sabbatical until counseling and reconciliation with his wife had been completed? This is standard procedure in other ministries - along with, on occasion, dismissal and replacement.

Instead, the Lambs posted the following on their website:

"After Joni told her husband the Lord convinced her he was worth fighting for, together they submitted to an intense process of repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation and restoration through pastoral counseling and personal accountability under the leadership of an expanded church-based spiritual authority team."

What is "an expanded church-based spiritual authority team?" And why didn't this team consider the people who watch the Lamb's television ministry worth including in this reconciliation? Granted, the actual sexual component of an extra-marital affair affect the husband and wife the most. But if you're a preacher of the Gospel with a television ministry, don't you owe your congregation some sort of apology? Do you wait until you fear being exposed before you try and backtrack publicly?

And if it was, of all people, your employees who learned about the affair and told your wife, wouldn't you - and your wife! - want to lavish some Biblical therapy on them to help them sort through what has happened? After all, if they're the dedicated employees you'd want to have working for a TV ministry, they would be heartbroken, disillusioned, and angry. Why didn't the Lambs have pity for the people who found themselves caught in the middle? From all outward appearances, haven't they just concentrated on themselves?

All of This is Getting Old

Maybe they're the Gospel charlatans many televangelist critics have supposed them to be. Maybe because they have a horribly shallow faith that can't see beyond money and ratings? Maybe because they're so myopic and driven that one's personal reputation comes before treating one's employees fairly and with grace after they're the ones who learn of your affair?

Defenders of the Lambs might accuse me of charging into this story like a bull in a China shop. I don't know enough of the facts to render a judgment. This is still a private matter that we have no business interfering with.

To which I retort with an unequivocal: Balderdash! God holds ministers of His Gospel to a high standard, and fellow believers have the right to expect sin to be dealt with in accordance with those high standards. Notice, I didn't say we have the right to expect ministers to be perfect. Some people may have expected the Lambs to be saints, and I'm not blaming them because they're not. But believers do have the right to not be deceived by those who lead us.

Of course, the Lambs will be in court soon, explaining away how and why they did what they did - to each other, and their employees. And it will all become public record.

Oddly enough, if they had done the right thing - even after Marcus's unfaithfulness, they would probably have emerged from this mess with a lot more privacy than they're going to be left with now.

Which is too bad for all of us.
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Pot, We'd Better Meet the Kettle

It's hard to talk about legalizing marijuana with a straight face. This narcotic has born the brunt of goofy jokes for years, and acquired a legion of pop-culture slang terms. Compared with much harder illicit drugs out there today, marijuana, or pot, or weed seems so relatively benign, it's hard to get worked into a lather about it.

We've heard all the reasons why some people would like to see it legalized:

• It's a great pain medicine, and people suffering severe physical hardships should have legal access to it.


• Legalizing marijuana could immediately wipe out a lot of drug-related crime, from human trafficking to illegal immigration to inner-city gang wars.


• Legalizing pot means you can tax it, which could provide a lucrative revenue stream for taxing authorities.

We've also heard all the reasons why some people say it should never be legalized:

• Marijuana isn't the only pain medicine out there. Why use a narcotic when we have legal drugs that have been clinically tested?


• Legal access to marijuana won't cure the physical damage it causes in the health, earning potential, and longevity of its users.


• Latin American drug cartels aren't going to simply close-up shop if marijuana is de-criminalized in the United States. They'll just move on to something else so they can preserve the empires they've built with other peoples' blood.

In a way, I'm rather amazed that the talk of legalizing marijuana continues to surface in our social dialog. The valedictorian of my high school class back in the 80's was advocating for the decriminalization of pot, and it was already an old idea at the time. Some First World countries and a few states have approved medical marijuana, although widespread acceptance of the drug still seems more the stuff of juvenile dreams and frat boy jokes than anything else.

Then again, we Americans have become so jaded by duplicitous politicians and their reasons for supporting or opposing legalization, talk of making marijuana legal sounds more like a pipedream (pardon the pun) than legitimate legislation. We hear contradictory scientific studies on the merits and disadvantages of marijuana, and a lot of myths on both sides of the argument masquerade as fact. Even our own increasing ambivalence towards morality in general encourages advocates for legalization to live in hope that one of these days, Americans will simply give in.

But what are the facts about marijuana? As it turns out, reality is a bit more murky than both sides care to admit.

• It is not considered particularly addictive. Depending on a variety of factors, including frequency of use, dosage, and ancillary drug use like alcohol, between 9 and 10 percent of users develop a clinical addiction over time.


• Doctors and scientists suspect that it causes some health problems, can harm the fetus if a pregnant woman uses it, and can lower worker productivity, but nobody can say whether marijuana use itself is the culprit, or other factors which can actually precipitate marijuana use.


• Psychologically, marijuana can become a crutch, masking other problems and distorting one's ability to deal effectively with stressful or complicated situations.


• Virtually everybody agrees that it alters the user's awareness, which makes pot as dangerous as alcohol for drivers, pilots, and other people who need to keep a clear head.

Maybe now you can see why the issue isn't as clear-cut as many people on both sides of the issue would like it to be.

What strikes me most about this topic, however, is how similar marijuana sounds to alcohol. Try to find a reputable source on the Internet which doesn't admit that marijuana consumed sporadically, by adults, in small doses, without other mood-altering drugs, causes more problems than the same type of alcohol consumption. If alcohol didn't enjoy the widespread social acclaim that it does, would we be having the same debates over beer and wine that we're having over marijuana?

By way of full disclosure, perhaps I should inform people who don't regularly read my blog that I don't drink. Maybe this makes it easier for me to imagine a world in which alcohol, a conventional drug, and marijuana, a drug with a bad reputation, can be compared. I'm sure most people at their country club's bar right now would consider me insane for even suggesting their gin & tonic or imported beer has the potential of inflicting the same type of damage we suspect marijuana of being capable of.

Nevertheless, doesn't it make sense that the apparent reality of marijuana's similar affects on consumers as alcohol plays a greater role in the discussion of marijuana's legalization? Why has alcohol enjoyed virtually a universally-cheered position in cultures the world over, while marijuana - which carries the same dangers and, frankly, quite similar pleasures - has been stigmatized as illicit?

If it's simple ignorance as to the similarity between marijuana and alcohol, then maybe, if society continues to frown on pot, we need to call the proverbial kettle black, too. Shouldn't we need to re-visit how harmful alcohol can be to our society? And whether or not we really benefit from having multinational conglomerates peddling all sorts of libations to people who need to keep a clear head?

Of course, if society decides that marijuana is harmless and should be legalized, then what does that say about our willingness to tolerate people driving under intoxicating influences, people getting hooked on substances that can distort their ability to function in the workplace, and people who need artificial crutches to cope with interpersonal relationships?

After all, we already have enough of those types of people with legal alcohol. And look how much good it's doing us.

And them.
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Your Money or Your Life? Part 2

For Part 1, please click here

Yesterday, you may have thought I painted the case for lavish charity with too broad a brush. Perhaps I left a little too many blobs of paint on your worldview, or maybe I didn't color mine in well enough.

Well, lest you think I'm just letting off steam or railing against the mindsets of other people, let me remind you that in my essays, I'm often preaching to myself. So if any of my convictions stick in your consciousness, then by all means, work them out for yourself, but don't think I'm not doing the same thing in my own soul.

I'm no better - and probably a lot worse - than anybody reading these essays. And oftentimes, I find myself writing things that I had no idea would appear on my computer screen. Some people would say that's the Holy Spirit directing me to say things that maybe I wouldn't normally say. But at the risk of sounding pious or holier-than-thou, I'll simply admit that just because I write something in an essay doesn't mean I've already mastered it myself.

And don't all of us run the risk of spending so much time talking and debating, that gritty Kingdom work gets left on the back burner? I don't particularly enjoy ministering to people mired in raw poverty. I spent a semester in graduate school studying the fledgling homeless shelter here in Arlington, and have volunteered there some, but while I have friends who selflessly serve at the shelter, I feel conspicuous by my inadequacy.

I think I may have already shared the story of walking through Union Square one chilly, rainy evening, and encountering a homeless man begging for money to buy a meal. Like a good New Yorker, I brushed past him, pretending to ignore him, but I turned the corner and ducked into a pizzeria. After purchasing a thick, steaming slice of Sicilian pizza and a chilled bottle of orange juice, I went back outside to the beggar around the corner. In the pouring rain, I held up the pizza and juice to him, expecting at least a smile, if not outright gratitude. Instead, his face soured up, his fiery gaze glancing at the pizza and then scornfully at me.

"What the ---- is this?" he bellowed.

"You said you wanted money for food, so I thought you were hungry," I explained, realizing I had caught him in his lie. And sure enough, he batted the plate with the pizza disdainfully with a greasy hand, shot off some unimaginative expletives, and stalked off into the rain.

If you've ever been to New York City, you've probably seen plates of half-eaten food left on ledges and benches. People sometimes leave their leftovers for the homeless to eat, so they don't have to paw through garbage cans. It's hardly any more sanitary or appetizing, but that's what I did with the pizza and juice. I left it on a broad granite window ledge, and continued my journey home, vowing to never again pay any heed to street beggars.

We All Owe Someone

Indeed, I have my own preconceived ideas about why certain segments of the population are notoriously poor, and I struggle with the idea that God doesn't give a lot of caveats when He tells us to reallocate funds He's given us to them.

But that's really the core of this issue, isn't it? None of what we have is ours. Even if you've gone to college and graduate school and earn a six-figure income, working 60-hour weeks, the salary you receive isn't yours because you deserve it. Is it? Maybe on a basic economic level, but there's more to it than that, isn't there? God gave you talents and abilities, and He's placed you in a part of the world where you're privileged to leverage those abilities through education and work to create a profession that accomplishes something our society values. But are you entitled to what you earn solely on the basis of your own accomplishments?

Who put you in North America, within easy access to some of the best educational systems and most lucrative employment opportunities in the world? Who gave you the ability to think, process information, and learn? Who provided you a job to put your skills to work? Who created our society and sovereignly allows your profession to be one our society is willing to pay for? Who created our treasury and currency, without which your paycheck would be worthless?

Is Everybody Worth What They Earn?

You can see where I'm going with this, can't you? And maybe you're objecting, protesting that reality is much more complex than that. To which I'd also agree - God has allowed mankind to rig the system so that our Ultimate Benefactor gets easily obscured. Well, "rig the system" may seem a bit harsh to some evangelical capitalists, but that's what's happened, isn't it?

After all, the profession of public school teaching has become so marginalized in our society that far fewer highly-qualified people choose it as a profession, or stay in it after a few years. Our society values teachers so poorly that we pay them a fraction of their merit in terms of training future generations to be innovators and thinkers themselves. Nursing represents another profession - oddly, also staffed mostly by women - which demands exceptional proficiency without the financial reward.

On the other hand, stock brokers on Wall street can earn upwards of one billion dollars a year by gaming risks and betting other people's money. But since so many people stand to also reap a windfall if the risks fall on the right side of the ledger, we all cheer in the face of the utter futility such actions pose as legitimate ways to produce a viable commodity. After all, as we've seen in the past couple of years, electronic money doesn't have nearly as much value as what it's supposed to be able to buy.

Money Love

Not that money itself is the problem. Money is just another thing, like shirts, trees, and diplomas. It can sit in your bank account, or in a drawer at your home. It's neither good nor bad. It can be transferred, accidentally washed in the laundry, tossed into the air at the start of a game, pay for good things, pay for bad things, appreciate, and depreciate.

But we love it so much, don't we? We like the way a lot of it makes us feel. We like the things we can buy with it. We like how it can insulate us from people who don't have as much of it as we do.
And before we know it, the poor have fallen completely off our radar. The only times we think about them are when people like Rush Limbaugh rant about how much of our money those lazy poor ingrates want now.

Many Americans who consider themselves to be self-made people with an admirable net worth tend to forget that many things are relative. Yet there is an economic line in the sand, called the "cost of living" in the United States, which can make life incredibly hard or easy, depending on which side of the line you happen to sit.

Tale From the Village

As I've mentioned before, one of the reasons I like New York City so much involves its many contradictions and exaggerations of life. And Manhattan, in particular, offers a slice of American life that is more true than its cacophony of multiculturalism, sheer vertical audacity, and excess of almost everything might initially suggest.

One of these slices of life has to do with the cost of living. And in New York, factors related to costs of living smack you in the face all the time.

You might recall my essays describing the middle class housing experiments of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town along Manhattan's 14th Street, between Union Square and the East River. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, as it was called then, built the massive complexes after the Second World War as GI's came home and started families. Many servicemen checked in with their parents in New York's aging neighborhoods and took a quick turn out to Long Island, to the brand new invention called the suburbs, of which Levittown was the first.

Meanwhile, back in New York City, top business leaders saw the need for keeping middle class families in the heart of Manhattan. Teachers, nurses, hardware store owners, chefs, garbagemen, police officers, office clerks, and low-level managers still offered valuable services to the city's business class. However, ever since its founding, New York has not exactly boasted a low cost of living. Keeping enough attractive housing affordable enough in the city presented enough of a challenge on the open market, so to enhance the option of city living over the brand-new suburbs, New York's power brokers got the city to create some inventive incentives for Met Life to construct Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. Even today, they remain bastions of middle-class housing on an island that has seen its open market real estate prices skyrocket.

So what? Does this have anything to do with poverty and money?

Well, I hope so. I'm trying to draw a picture of how capitalism doesn't necessarily value what it should. I'm not saying capitalism is evil or fatally flawed, but you have to admit that it isn't perfect. Sometimes situations are created through the course of economic dynamics that can't be ignored as simply the price we pay for enjoying capitalism. Sometimes, the rich - in New York's case, the corporate titans who didn't want their police officers and secretaries all forced to commute in from the suburbs - need to make allowances for people who would otherwise be shut out of certain economic realities. Call it limousine liberalism if you want, having some well-heeled New York businessmen take pity on lowly schoolteachers and bus drivers so they can have a corner of the city all to themselves. But it has worked - at least, up until now.

Granted, compared with the rest of the country, the rents residents of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town pay seem shockingly high, but for Manhattan rates, they're artificially low. You really need to have lived in Manhattan and forked out market rate rents for yourself to see how important this story is to the ethic of accommodating certain income disparities. Suffice it to say that while this experiment does indeed violate the principles of pure capitalism, its long-term benefits have proven valuable: it's ensured a sizable population of middle class consumers for local merchants, kept teachers close to public schools and other public servants close to city facilities, provided city companies with low-level employees who don't have long commutes, and maintained a stable neighborhood which has become an anchor for gentrification in adjoining neighborhoods. Those are all assets which may not have big dollars attached to them, but sometimes, it takes money to make money. And that's how I think the original intent of these complexes has been rewarded.

God's Economy Isn't Capitalism

Of course, I realize this is not a seamless comparison between conservatives grousing about entitlement programs and people who are poor because they are lazy. All the residents of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town have middle-class income and employment; these have never been public housing complexes in the slum sense of the term. And some developers, drooling over these properties' profit potential, have complained for years that these two complexes mock the very economic underpinnings that have made New York City the finance capital of the world.

Yet for all their dowdy aesthetics, contrived civic value, and limited applicability to other cities, Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town represent an acknowledgement that society can benefit from financial grace. This wasn't an experiment in Utopian, altruistic good-for-goodness sake. It was a long-range endorsement of the value hard-working yet minimal-wage people contribute to a community. It represented an understanding that some people will be paid more than others, but that doesn't mean the lower-paid folks are scum.

Which is where it all comes down to relativity. Many middle-class Americans bristle with disdain at the notion of their taxes supporting welfare cases. But for those of us who believe in Christ, how can we reconcile that animosity with Ezekiel 16:49, "Now this was the sin of your sister, Sodom... they did not help the poor and needy..."

Some people need more help than others, and sometimes costs of living become inequitable. This is where poverty starts, and to the extent that we can help mitigate it, shouldn't we?

I'm not saying that everything liberals have done to address poverty is right, and all of the problems conservatives find in our current welfare state don't really exist. We have a distorted and ineffective entitlement system that needs to be overhauled.

But can we ignore our responsibility to participate in the solution? And not giving anything, even while the systems are broken, is not a Biblical option. Instead of saying entitlements reward laziness, and that taxation to fund entitlements is wealth redistribution, let's get serious about whose money we're talking about here.

God's economy isn't capitalism. Capitalism is a man-made economic contrivance, just like communism, feudalism, neo-colonialism, socialism, and all of the other "ism's" societies have used to structure their financial resources. While I happen to consider capitalism to be the most effective socioeconomic structure ever invented, I hold no false illusions as to its ability to cure everything that ails us. At best, capitalism can provide a robust framework for guiding our economy, but even the best-engineered framework is designed to flex a bit to accommodate adversity.

Now, I'm hardly the prototype of the flexible, accommodating personality. But when it comes to managing God's money and helping those in poverty, I'm trying! How about you?

In Memoriam

Before I close, please allow me to remember this day that "lives in infamy;" December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. The first residents of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town were people who fought in the war precipitated by that fateful day.
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Your Money or Your Life? Part 1

Sometimes you have to hit me upside the head to get my attention.

At least, that's how today has seemed.

This morning, I came across a Bible passage from Ezekiel 16:49, which carries a stiff warning: " 'Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy...'"

Then I read an interview on ChristianityToday.com with Redeemer Presbyterian's Tim Keller, in which he bluntly states, "It's biblical that we owe the poor as much of our money as we can possibly give away."

But still, I cluelessly trolled the Internet in search of a suitable topic for today's essay. I didn't think I had found anything, and began sinking into a gathering cloud of discouragement as the afternoon wore on. Then, a longtime friend contacted me about something we had discussed a while ago, and mentioned that their pastor yesterday reminded the congregation that Christ wasn't born so we could lavish ourselves with stuff.

Lavish ourselves with stuff.

And that was the *whomp!* upside my head.

Who is Teaching You About Wealth?

I've written about North American Christians and poverty before, and spent some time evaluating Keller's convictions about lavish charity. But that all sounded too counter-cultural to be practical. Instead, we've been bombarded by political hyperbole from conservatives furious that entitlement programs continue to sap them dry so lazy pigs can wallow at the trough of liberal wealth redistribution. And that has made a lot more sense to us pragmatists.

While most of this rhetoric has come from some of the most Biblically illiterate people in the United States, namely our conservative talk radio stars, some religious conservatives have also jumped on the social-welfare-as-socialist-propaganda bandwagon. Combined, these right-wing pundits have succeeded in crafting the illusion that poor people deserve to be poor, and rich people deserve to be free from worrying about poor people.

Now, if you need Biblical references for proof of this fallacy, then maybe you should read your Bible more than you listen to Rush, Beck, Hannity, and the other peddlers of financial idolatry. You're not going to get God's perspective of money by listening to guys who've made their wealth sitting in radio studios, swaddled in leather chairs, feeding their listeners a daily diet of testosterone-fueled vitriol against anybody who dares to think before they vote.

Then again, they wouldn't be making their millions if they didn't have millions of listeners across the country who enjoyed being spoon-fed this pablum. Rush and his ilk get some stuff right, yet their credibility gets washed away by the flood of stuff they get wrong.

Reality Check

But I digress.

Nobody is saying that to be a good follower of Christ you need to give away everything you have and check in to your local homeless shelter. How does that really help anybody? Christ never tells us to become dirt poor, but His Gospel expects us to pursue a healthy economic balance between those who have abundance and those in need.

He tells us to give our redundant possessions to those who lack; for example, people with two coats should give one to the person who can't afford to buy any. If that's wealth redistribution, then I guess wealth redistribution is a Biblical concept, isn't it?

Not that when it comes to our government, all of our taxes should go to propping up what has become a wasteful, corrupt welfare system. Since we live in a close approximation of a democracy, we have the right and - hopefully - ability to work towards equitable support for people who may be experiencing some sort of disadvantage, and to advocate for change when bureaucratic systems actually harm society by perpetuating poverty.

I'll even go as far as to claim that some political liberals have actually abused poverty to subjugate classes of Americans and trick them into voter servitude by denying them chances to advance themselves. If black Americans still in our country's ghettos could see how their Maxine Waters' and Charles Rangel's have manipulated them for personal gain, we would have a breakthrough in race relations and economic opportunity. But here, too; if the evangelical church was carrying more of this social welfare burden instead of the government, we would be in a better position to direct the money we're spending towards programs we believe will yield better results.

For example, by the way our government has handled welfare programs, a lot of people have come to expect such benefits, and have cultivated the attitude of entitlement which grates against taxpayers. Generational poverty has evolved from this constant spoon-feeding of benefits which oftentimes rewards the lack of motivation and perpetuates sexual activity which, frankly, breeds more people who cyclically become dependants of the welfare state. This type of deliberate slothfulness is unbiblical, and if churches exercised their proper role in the funding of social programming, we could more effectively teach against such unethical behavior. Being poor is not morally or ethically wrong in and of itself; but when you decide to choose entitlement over initiative, you are not honoring Christ. The writers of Proverbs repeatedly say that if you don't work, you don't eat.

We Can't Let Go of the Money

Yet, even after we did all we could to reasonably insure that money going to poor people was being well-spent, how upset should we become when we learn that people are still abusing the system, and wrangling for entitlements they don't deserve?

With our current system, conservatives get all bent out of shape, furious at the injustice of working people paying taxes that are squandered on lazy poor people. But are we really upset about the perceived moral inequity, or are we upset about... the MONEY?

Does it all still come down to our love of money? Does it all still boil down to our desire to keep as much of it for ourselves as possible? Do we forget that whatever we claim to have "earned" in our jobs, through an inheritance, or even by marriage, comes from God Himself? If it's all His money to begin with, and we're simply taking advantage of an earthly system which rewards people based on jobs our society is willing to pay for, how mad should we get if we see poor people using money we've given them in inefficient and ineffective ways? How much does our own squandering of money sadden our God Who gave it to us in the first place? Are we trying to get the speck out of somebody else's eye when we've got a 2x4 sticking out of ours?

I'm not saying we should give money to people we know will, by their ingratitude, automatically flush it down the toilet. But on the Day of Judgment, those people will be held accountable for how they spent that money. And when we get to Heaven, we'll be evaluated by how we treated them - and with what attitude.

After all, the reward for us isn't the bigger house and the comfortable retirement here on Earth. It's the reward waiting for us in Heaven.

Maybe it's not only the squanderers of entitlement programs who are wasting their opportunities.
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Tomorrow: Part 2