Global labor, liberation, & the Social Gospel
In this Labor Day edition of Wendland-Cook’s Interventions, we are providing a series of reflections on the assigned scripture readings based on the Revised Common Lectionary in the Christian tradition for September 1, 2024. This is the fourth year that the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt has produced a lectionary commentary for the Labor Day readings. By providing clergy and faith leaders with different readings of common passages, we hope to provide alternative lenses to scripture and to open up interpretative possibilities for how the Bible speaks to the reality of working people.
In this series, Wilson Dickinson, Ansley Quiros and Joerg Rieger all offer new readings on familiar texts. Dickinson explores how class differences are often moralized and entrenched in our social norms and expectations of what is right and proper. As he argues, “At stake [in the Markan passage] are the ways that social visions are internalized and lived out.” Quiros carries forward this power analysis in her reading of James to explore the life of faith that animates the struggle of deep solidarity. Rieger’s own analysis helps us see how religion itself is often twisted toward unjust ends by the powerful (and how capitalism itself becomes a religion). All three of these commentary help us reframe these passages for preaching and thinking with working people.
We are especially excited to feature Dickinson and Quiros, as they are participants in our Social Gospel in the South working group, a part of the Sesquicentennial project that has produced podcasts and other Interventions forums exploring the role of the Social Gospel in the South, an often forgotten tradition of working people struggling for solidarity that can inspire our liberation struggles today.
These reflections are designed to provide pastors and congregational leaders with ideas, stories, and insights on how to preach, teach, and organize around the issues of labor and economic justice during and following the Labor Day holiday. It is our hope that these short reflections provide theological and practical tools for honoring the dignity of labor this Labor Day and beyond through tangible actions. Take a read, and join us in the effort of reclaiming the longstanding tradition of Christian solidarity and witness around issues of labor!
Take and Read!
-Aaron Stauffer
Contributors: Wilson Dickinson, Ansley Quiros, and Joerg Rieger,
Breaking Etiquette for Solidarity and Cooperation:
T. Wilson Dickinson
14 August 2024
Celebrating Labor Day is complicated by many of the false pieties that surround work. Professional class people are subtly trained throughout their lives—through various tests and assessments—to associate achievement, status, and success with merit, talent, and hard work. These social scripts invite us to understand hierarchies in the workplace and economic inequality as the results of a virtuous game. This allows the rich and powerful to pose as benefactors, who magnanimously give what they have earned to those who please them, while shrouding structures of domination and exploitation. This fosters resentments that code the struggles of other people as personal failings. It also makes solidarity between professional and working-class people difficult, as conventions and etiquette in matters like dress, speech, and education are coded in moral terms. The ethical and social norms that surround work tend not to promote equity and community, but domination and competition dressed up as virtues (1).
The lectionary passage from Mark 7:1-23, by contrast, helpfully unveils similar false pieties. Furthermore, it can help us understand Christ’s wider vision that sought the integration of faith and labor centered on solidarity and cooperation. To see these possibilities at work in the text, it is first necessary to understand the power and class dynamics that are woven throughout the story.
The animating conflict of the entire passage is that some Pharisees and scribes (2) call into question the eating practices of Jesus’ disciples, who were eating with “defiled hands” (7:1-2). Doing so broke with the purity codes of the Pharisees (Mk 7:3-5). As Jin Young Choi explains, these purity codes were a part of the dominant social order that sought to shape common sense and social spaces (3). To be defiled was to be out of place on the social map. These codes were part of the mechanism whereby hegemonic order was internalized by everyday people. This system of etiquette supported and incarnated ruling class ideologies that declared that the rich and successful were on top because they played by the rules and did the work that kept everything going, whereas the poor and the losers broke the rules and were a drain on the system (4). These practices of etiquette clothe elites in purity and faithfulness and make Jesus’ companions out to be polluting covenant breakers.
Yet, there are a couple of aspects in these early verses that turn our attention away from questions of proper etiquette to underlying power dynamics. First, Mark underlines that these are elites from the center of power in Jerusalem, who are out scrutinizing the periphery of the countryside. Jesus is teaching in the villages, cities, and farms surrounded by the sick in the marketplace—those exploited by and excluded from the economy of empire (Mk 6:56). Second, the Greek word translated as “defiled” is koinos, and could be more literally translated as “common” hands (5). And so, if we peel away the rhetoric of piety, we can begin to see that there is a dynamic of snobbery at work that is pretending to be faithful.
These power and class dynamics are further centered as Mark explains to the reader that the Pharisees “do not eat anything from the market unless they wash” (7:4). Mark highlights the economic aspects at the heart of the story by situating the practice in relationship to the marketplace (agora). As Ched Myers notes, food from the market could be classified as impure for two reasons: the farmer could have grown the food “in violation of Sabbath or other regulations; or the fruits may not have undergone proper separation for tithes” (6). The issue of tithing is especially important, because it was a portion of the harvest that was collected by elites. It siphoned off some of the community’s labor to be given to the priestly class, who were typically of greater means themselves. It was a redistribution of wealth going the wrong way (7). Drawing upon the prophetic tradition, Jesus declares that rather than honoring God with these practices, they are simply honoring themselves (Mk 7:6-7/Is 29:13).
Jesus makes these economic dynamics explicit with his critique of the practice of the Corban (which is, unfortunately, excluded from the lectionary selection). The Corban was a dedication of some resources, like land, to the priests. This dedication of land and crops to elites took them out of the shared use of the family and the wider community (Mk 7:11-12). While the practice of Corban was dressed up in priestly garments, Jesus underlines that it is a violation of the heart of the covenant. He laments that rather than honoring the call to take care of vulnerable elderly parents it places the fruits of communal labor in the pockets of priests (Mk 7:9-13). This violates the covenant which seeks to protect the vulnerable and to sustain a simple and joyful community (8).
Jesus reverses the charge of the elite, but with a different analysis of the situation and vision of the life of faith. He declares that the source of defilement is the heart, not food. At stake are the ways that social visions are internalized and lived out. He illustrates this with a list of vices that lead to broken community (Mk 7:20-23). As a member of the revolutionary community of farmers, artists, and theologians in Solentiname, Nicaragua (Manuelito), comments on the passage, “Everything is pure in nature. And injustice is the only thing that dirties people and the universe” (9).
Rather than getting lost in the weeds of the debates over the etiquette of the elite, we can see the stakes of this story for contemporary issues of labor if we listen for Jesus’ wider vision of covenantal economics (10). Christ is disrobing the priestly pretenses of the elite, revealing them as the manners of the ruling class that seek to cover up their role in exploitation and oppression. In its place, he points to the covenantal communities of village life marked by mutual aid, solidarity, and cooperation. Here one finds right relationship through cooperation with one’s neighbors and by caring for the land (as I have argued more fully in my book The Green Good News). As Richard Horsely writes, “Jesus’ covenant renewal aimed to retain and regenerate the people’s own power in their local community and to stem the flow of local resources upward to enhance the power of the rulers” (11).
This coming Labor Day offers churches a similar opportunity to begin to see the false pieties connected to work that mask injustice in our own contexts and to begin to enact forms of solidarity and cooperation that incarnate that alternative way. In professional class congregations this might mean thinking about the norms and power dynamics that often surround and undermine our efforts to work for justice (which I have considered in more detail in chapter 6 of The Green Good News) (12). Perhaps this means beginning to explore the constructive work of finding ways that the community can enter into and support solidarity economies through cooperative efforts, like those that are being networked and resourced by Wendland Cook’s Solidarity Circles, the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development, the Black Church Food Security Network, or the Faith Lands efforts of Agrarian Trust. Following the teachings of Christ, we can challenge the refined etiquette and manners that obscure injustice surrounding our everyday relationships with labor, so that we can begin to enter into the solidarity and cooperation of covenantal community.
Notes:
See further T. Wilson Dickinson, The Green Good News: Christ’s Path to Sustainable and Joyful Life (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2019), Ch 5. Exercises in New Creation from New Creation from Paul to Kierkegaard (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2018), 76-87. Singing the Psalms with My Son: Praying and Parenting for a Healed Planet (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2023), Ch 5, 6.
As I am underlining the class and power dynamics in this passage, it is important to understand the scribes as part of the governing elite and the Pharisees (especially their depiction in the story) as part of the retainer class “who served the priestly class.” Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted (New York: Double Day, 2006), 56-58. See further Dickinson, Green Good News, 69-74; 159-164.
Jin Young Choi, Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian American Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 90-92.
See further Dickinson, The Green Good News, 71-72.
This particular usage and meaning of koinos is not limited to this context (See for example Rm 14:14 and Heb 10:29). Jesus even uses it himself in the passage, redirecting the charge of defilement against the Pharisees (Mk 7:18). So there is a way in which Jesus is extending the rhetorical condemnation of the commoner as defiled. Yet, as Jin Young Choi argues, in the following passage, Christ’s positive deployment of the purity code is challenged and overcome by the Syrophoenician woman, who meets Jesus in a border place and challenges the dominant social map. The Syrophoenician woman, instead, calls Jesus into a space of commonality with alternative potentialities to that of the Empire. Jin, Postcolonial Discipleship, 94-98.
Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Maryknoll: Orbis Boos, 2017), 218.
Myers, Binding, 77. As Myers highlights, these tensions have already played out in an earlier conflict with the Pharisees in Mark (2:23-28), where the Pharisees try to hold up their account of the holiness code to prevent communal gleaning, in ibid., 161.
Richard Horsely, Jesus and the Powers: Conflict, Covenant, and the Hope of the Poor (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), 151, 152.
Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname, Vol. 2 (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1978), 207.
Richard Horsely, Covenant Economics: A Biblical Vision of Justice for All (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 127.
Horsley, Jesus and the Powers, 153.
See especially my reading of the related story of Luke 11:37-44, Dickinson Green Good News, 159-164. See further Joerg Rieger’s reflections on the difference between power and privilege and the significance this holds for cross-class solidarity. Theology in the Capitalcocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022), 162-178.
T. Wilson Dickinson is a theologian, minister, and organizer whose work takes place at the intersection of constructive theology, environmental justice, and social change. He teaches theology and is the Director of the Doctor of Ministry and Continuing Education Programs at Lexington Theological Seminary. He is author of Singing the Psalms with My Son: Praying and Parenting for a Healed Planet (Cascade, 2023); The Green Good News: Christ’s Path to Sustainable and Joyful Life (Cascade 2019); and Exercises in New Creation from Paul to Kierkegaard (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). He is currently working on a project on Christ and the Commons.
The Miracle of Solidarity
Ansley Quiros
14 August 2023
We know we are living in angry times. Every day, we are accosted with the echoes of urgent, insistent fury. Much of this anger, of course, is what Dan Allender and Tremper Longman call “righteous anger,” impassioned responses to the injustices of our day: inequality, poverty, homelessness, abuse, slander, ecological ruin and the like (1).
But our lectionary passage from James 1 admonishes believers in Jesus to be “quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. This is because the angry person doesn’t produce God’s righteousness.” How do we become people like this? How might anger lose its quick hold on our mouths and hearts? James tells us: by “humility,” by “welcom[ing] the word planted deep inside you—the very word that is able to save you.” That word, of course, is The Word: Jesus, Son of God, Friend of sinners, Suffering Servant, Crucified and Risen King. As the perfect reflection of the character and nature of God, God who repeatedly defines Himself as “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” Jesus offers us not only an example of a righteous life, but the power for one (2). We must, through the Holy Spirit, take hold of the person and work of Jesus to become those who are quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.
Before any other work can be done, then, we must remember who we are. Responding to the crowd’s question, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus responded, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (3). John’s gospel reminds us that before we labor, before we speak out or work for social justice, we must first work to believe in the grace of God, to believe that we are beloved. As our passage reminds us, “He chose to give us birth by his true word, and here is the result: we are like the first crop from the harvest of everything he created.” In Christ, we are the first fruits, we are God’s beautiful “workmanship,” His poema. Taking hold of that gift of grace, of faith, we can walk in “the good works, which God prepared beforehand,” the work of redemption in the world (4). Then, we become not only “hearers” of the word, but those who “study the perfect law, the law of freedom and continue to do it,” those who “don’t listen and forget, but put it into practice in their lives,” those who are “blessed in whatever they do.”
It makes me think, as I often do, of the remarkable footsoldiers of the Black freedom struggle. Facing the seemingly insurmountable—enshrined Jim Crow laws, white supremacist terrorism, choking poverty and exclusion—they revolutionized American society through a grassroots, nonviolent movement. But first, they had to remind themselves of their belovedness-- their “somebodiness,” as Rev. King would later put it. Arriving in Albany, Georgia in October 1961, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Field Secretary Charles Sherrod recalled that “the people were indifferent…afraid, really afraid. Sometimes we'd walk down the streets,” he continued, “and the little kids would call us Freedom Riders, and people walking in the same direction on the same side of the street would go across the street from us because they were afraid. They didn't want to be connected with us in any way.” But after weeks of organizing students and meeting in churches with ministerial associations, a shift of faith began (5). By November, when the Albany Movement held a mass meeting, the advertising handbill proclaimed: “Our beliefs have consequences. If we are of one blood, children of one common Father, brothers in the household of God, then we must be of equal worth in His family, entitled to equal opportunity in the society of men” (6). The men and women of rural Southwest Georgia understood and took hold of the truth that they were the work of God, the first crop of the harvest of righteousness to come, and now they could participate in bringing justice in their community with a spirit of freedom and love.
But make no mistake, this belief is work, if the work of grace, in a dehumanizing society. Every day we observe the fruits of its opposite: scarcity and fear and insecurity manifesting as rage towards others. And, sadly, it can be the most vicious and the most blinding in those who claim the name of Christ. As James puts it: “If those who claim devotion to God don’t control what they say, they mislead themselves. Their devotion is worthless.” James explains this self-deception as fundamentally a failure to know who we are. “You must be doers of the word and not only hearers who mislead themselves,” he says, “Those who hear but don’t do the word are like those who look at their faces in a mirror. They look at themselves, walk away, and immediately forget what they were like.” Again, I’m reminded of the civil rights struggle, of white churchgoers who proceeded from the sanctuaries of First Methodists all over the South, only to diminish and oppress their neighbors. They forgot they were loved by God and descended the church steps many a Sunday instead thinking they were gods themselves, superior to others and entitled to segregationist self-righteousness, arrogant and angry. Worst of all, they misled themselves into thinking they were enacting God’s will, doing God’s work, the delusion of a warped mirror’s reflection. But if we work to see rightly, in humility and gratitude, we have the clear eyes to God and self and neighbor in love.
So, this Labor Day, along with James my encouragement is that we pause to remember who we are. We are those created and loved by the God “in whose character there is no change at all,” reborn by his true Word, the first crop of the redeemed world that is coming. Pause, know, be filled up. Then, and only then, get to work. Get to work caring for orphans, the children of Section 8 and Dollar Generals, and widows, the hated “childless cat ladies,” and keep the world from contaminating us, with its poisonous reactivity, its meanness and quick anger. That might mean watering a neighbor’s garden. It might mean pushing a stroller or advocating for a child tax credit. It might mean paying fair wages or organizing a union. It might mean, like Charles Sherrod, organizing a mass meeting. I don’t know. But I do know that the task of our current moment, one of online vitriol and an “epidemic of loneliness,” is loving solidarity.
Recently, Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam commented on this. “We’re in a second Gilded Age,” he began in a recent interview with New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “To what extent do we think that we’re all in this together, or it’s every man for himself, or every man or woman?” Clearly the latter, Putnam claimed, leading to fatal rates of isolation and troubling political extremism. The cause, he said, “turns out to be morality, according to my reading of this evidence.” Putnam continued, “What stands upstream of all these other trends is morality, a sense that we’re all in this together and that we have obligations to other people…we’re not going to fix polarization, inequality, social isolation until, first of all, we start feeling we have an obligation to care for other people” (7). Those loved by God can boldly care for other people, can fearlessly pursue solidarity, because they have faith that they are loved, they are filled, that there is enough. All good gifts come from above, James puts it. If we know who we are, the first crop of grace, we can keep at the slow, hard work of solidarity-- grateful, slow to anger, slow to speak, quick to listen, always trusting, always working, always loved.
Notes:
Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman, The Cry of the Soul (NavPress, 2015).
See: Exodus 34; Numbers 14; Nehemiah 9; Psalms 86, 103; 145; Joel 2; Jonah 4; Nahum 1.
John 6:28-29.
Ephesians 2:10.
Charles Sherrod, quoted in Freedom In the Air: A Documentary on Albany, Georgia 1961-1962, Alan Lomax Archive.
Albany Nonviolent Movement, mimeographed handbill, 9 November 1961.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely: The Interview” The New York Times, July 13, 2024.
Dr. Ansley Quiros, an Atlanta native, is a historian of the twentieth century United States, with a focus on race, politics and religion. Her first book, God With Us: Lived Theology and the Black Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942-1976 (UNC, 2018) examines the struggle over race and Christian theology in Southwest Georgia. She is currently working on two new projects: a spiritual biography of Charles and Shirley Sherrod and an examination of Freaknik, an Atlanta street party in the 1990s. Along with Brian Dempsey, she co-directs the Civil Rights Struggle in the Shoals Project, a National Park Services Grant awarded to UNA in 2018.
Joerg Rieger
15 August 2024
Labor Day 2024
Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9
Joerg Rieger
These passages from Deuteronomy 4 introduce the particular version of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5 (there is another version in Exodus 20).
In the current political climate in the United States, it is always the conservatives that emphasize the Ten Commandments. Most recently, certain Southern US states have made efforts to post them again on the walls of their schools and courthouses. Why might this be happening and how might the Ten Commandments be reclaimed in a different spirit?
Let's take a look at some examples. In conservative America, it appears that those who most often reference the Ten Commandments assume that they apply mainly to others. White supremacy, for instance, is built on the assumption that white people are superior to others, so that injunctions like “thou shalt not steal” seem to apply mostly to non-white people. This attitude can also be seen in the common practice of racial profiling that assumes that non-white people are generally more suspicious and probably also less righteous than white people.
Likewise, in conservative America it seems that God and country belong inextricably together. Injunctions like not to have any other gods before God and not to make idols are taken to apply to other people. This commandment, therefore, is used to put down people of different or of no religions, and even Christians whose beliefs differ from some conservative norms that probably date back to the 1950s.
But if one reads the Ten Commandments from the perspective of the people, everything changes. This Labor Day, let's take another look at the Ten Commandments from the perspective of the working majority. This will make it more relevant to the 99 percent of us who have to work for a living.
What is the most pressing problem of stealing from the perspective of the working majority? Most people might not be aware of it, but significantly more value is stolen in the United States every year due to wage theft than any other thefts combined. This is a significant issue, which reframes not only this particular commandment but all of them. What if we turned the tables and looked at the real perpetrators instead of blaming those who always get the blame, namely racial and ethnic minorities, women, and all who are in one way or another different from some imagined conservative mainline.
On the topic of theft, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht once wondered: “What [crime] is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” This statement does not excuse bank robberies, but it focuses our attention on the bigger crimes that are usually committed with impunity and are often not even seen as crimes. Pointing beyond the obvious crime of wage theft, this raises the question of how wages, salaries, and benefits are calculated for all of us who have to work for a living. In a world where the rich are getting richer and everybody else poorer, these are extremely relevant questions to which a rereading of the Ten Commandments can point us.
On the question of God, what might it mean to have other gods before God and to make idols? This may not always be an intentional process. Might it be possible to unwittingly confuse the gods which we are taking for granted in our everyday lives with the true God? Some of us have argued that economics today functions more and more like a religion and that in the end the capitalist economy tends to become God. While this would require a longer argument, let me just say that there is a very real possibility what we are calling god is actually not God at all but an idol. And what about a patriotism that identifies God with one’s favorite politicians who can therefore do no wrong even if they are convicted of crimes? The reformer Martin Luther once said in his Shorter Catechism: “God is that to which your heart clings and entrusts itself.”
It should be clear by now that the Ten Commandments are not the property of conservative America. The same is true for any other sacred writings, particularly the Bible, that are often misused in this way. The good news is not only that many of our traditions point us in fresh directions, but that there are ways of reading these ancient traditions constructively that are life giving, liberating, and point us to a different future. What if we were able to “stop the steal”—the real steal where the majority of humanity are the victims—for good and finally worship the true God who is known by setting the people free?
Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Affiliate Faculty, Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, and the Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program.